


flying in the face of science

by fuckitfireeverything



Category: Marvel, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Astronauts, M/M, space travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-11
Updated: 2012-07-26
Packaged: 2017-11-07 12:41:09
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 27,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/431321
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fuckitfireeverything/pseuds/fuckitfireeverything
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four years ago, Steve Rogers was the only returning crew member of the Ares I expedition, a research mission to Mars gone wrong. Half of his crew died, and he left two of them -- James Barnes and Peggy Carter -- behind so he could return to Earth and get help. The day he got back to Earth, Phil Coulson began planning a rescue mission, the Ares II. This is the story of that mission.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired initially (and titled after) by Amanda Palmer's "Astronaut (A Short History of Nearly Nothing)," and then after that a long playlist of astronaut-themed songs.
> 
> I'm hoping it won't take me terribly long to get new chapters up -- right now it's estimated at 6 or so chapters total, but that is subject to change. This is my first longfic in a while, and while i'm really happy with where it's going, I'm also not sure how long it's going to end up sustaining itself. We'll see!
> 
> I must also here acknowledge several people without whom this would not have happened: Arielle for not hating me for the sporadic text messages I sent her with ideas and for encouraging me in the first place, Peri for editing pages and pages of this on top of all her other work, and of course the incredible beautiful Chaz for crying over this late at night over skype and threatening to sic her terrifying cat on me if I didn't finish it.

_“Steve, just fucking go already,” Bucky's voice rings through the comm link, cutting through the static._

_“I'm not leaving you,” he answers, his fists clenched on the frame of the door, his knuckles going white. He squints against the cloud of red sand, trying to make out the shape of the base through the storm. Behind him, the control panel beeps angrily as the ship tries to close the door to preserve its oxygen, and finds his body is in the way._

_“The pod can't fit all three of us. Take it, go home. We've got enough supplies here to last us at least five years as long as we stay on the base.”_

_“Bucky–”_

_“Steve.”_

_The voice that interrupts him this time isn't Bucky's, it's Peggy's, and it cuts a chill straight through Steve's heart as he looks back at the control panel, wracking his brain for any way to get all three of them off the planet. The pod's meant to shuttle them one at a time off the planet to the ship, and there's only enough fuel for one more trip._

_“Steve, listen to me,” Peggy tells him, her voice calm as always. “We have no contact with Earth right now. If you can get to the ship, you can get contact with them and let them know what happened. You can get home and start organizing a mission back here to pick us up. If you don't do that, all three of us will be stuck on this planet until we die.”_

_“I can't leave you, Peg,” he starts. “What if I can't come back for you?”_

_“We have a date, remember?” He can hear the small smile in her cracking voice. “I don't stand up my dates.”_

_He takes a breath and stands back from the door, his hands shaking. It closes with a whir, and the pod begins to rise off the ground, clearing the cloud of sand and making its way towards the ship in orbit._

_“Bucky,” he says. “Be safe. Peggy, I love you. I'll be back as soon as I can.”_

_“Roger that, Rogers,” Bucky jokes. “I'm not letting you leave us here, you owe me ten bucks from the–”_

_The comm goes out of range, and Bucky's voice cuts short, swallowed by silence._

_“I promise,” he says to the air, to no one in particular, to everyone. And then, “Ares, let's go home.”_


	2. Chapter 2

Phil wakes up sweaty and sticky in Clint’s bunk at oh-seven-thirty the morning of the Ares II launch. He’s crammed against the cinder block wall, with Clint’s arm draped heavy over his chest and the hard mattress doing wonders for his bad back. He shifts slightly at the sound of his phone alarm, and the movement wakes Clint, who turns his head, eyes barely open, and whispers, “Today’s the big day, huh?”

Phil smiles and Clint kisses him lazily before peeling off the sheets. They had been too exhausted to properly clean up the night before — Phil from a long day of last-minute triple-checking, sorting through equations and flight patterns and launch plans, and Clint from running through the final training routines with the crew members again and again to make sure they were prepared for launch. But with Phil’s nerves what they were, Clint had insisted that Phil stay the night in his room instead of going back to his apartment off-base, which, where Clint and Phil were concerned, was far from an unusual insistence. 

Now, however, Clint is pressing small kisses to the flushed skin of Phil’s chest, one hand holding Phil’s hip in that sure, steady, reassuring way only he can manage, and Phil looks down at him and sighs.

“I’ve got to be in Medical by eight to supervise the final physicals,” he tells Clint, who pretends not to hear him. 

Phil tries half-heartedly to pull away, though most of him wants to stay put and never move again. 

“Clint,” he warns, lifting Clint’s face from his skin gently with one hand.

“You can be a little late, can’t you?” Clint responds with a devilish grin, taking his hand and pulling him up off the mattress.

“No,” Phil tells him, but he already knows that realistically there’s no way he’s going to be on time now.

Clint drags him to the shower stall in the corner of the room. It's too small for two people, which has never stopped them before, but has convinced Phil that someday the two of them are going to share a real off-base apartment with a real bath they can actually fit in. Someday, when their relationship won’t jeopardize their jobs and Clint isn’t too busy training rookies to live off-base and Phil isn’t in his lab until terrible hours of the morning double-checking fuel measurements and orbitals and trajectories.

The hot water feels like a godsend on his skin, relaxing the muscles tensed by weeks of late nights and anxious anticipation. The past three and a half years of Phil’s life have been leading up to this day, but he lets the water carry with it the stress and worry and strain of the meticulous planning this mission had taken, setting aside the toll it had been taking on him. Of course, once the launch is over there will be a whole new set of stressors to deal with, supervising the entirety of the two hundred and fourteen-day flight, but between the hot water and Clint’s hands rubbing their way over his back, pressing out the tension and working into the knots in his muscles, he can forget for a while what the next few months have in store. 

“Don’t worry, babe,” Clint whispers, kissing his neck, sliding his hand over the skin of Phil’s chest. “Everything’s gonna go fine. With you planning it, how could it go wrong?”

It’s enough to untie the knot in Phil’s stomach. It’s also enough to persuade him to turn around and meet Clint’s lips with his own.

It’s 8:30 before he makes it out the door, hair wet and dressed in the wrinkled clothes he’d been wearing yesterday, and he’s surprisingly okay with that.

He stops by his new desk in Control on the way to the medical bay, grabbing a stack of files from the top drawer, and despite the insistent ticking of his watch reminding him that he is now almost forty-five minutes late, his fingers linger for a moment over a small black box tucked away in the bottom of the drawer. He flips it open for a moment, looking down at the smooth silver band that lays on the velvet cushion inside, and mentally double-checks that he’s made dinner reservations for tonight, off-base and out of the way, somewhere he can put the Ares II mission out of his mind for long enough to propose. 

He has the speech all planned out; he has to, he’s terrible with words on the spot and he’s terrified he’ll mess it up and Clint will say no. He wrote it down and memorized it, has been repeating it to himself in his spare moments for weeks, running through it in his mind while waiting in line, while in the shower, while trying to fall asleep. Clint, he’ll say. Will you marry me? And Clint will give him that skeptical look or make a crack about them getting so “domestic” and then Phil will take Clint’s hand and, provided he’s not so nervous he can’t breathe, he will tell him that he loves him and that there’s no way he could find anything or anyone in the world he wanted more than Clint.

Phil will say, I’ve spent my whole life wanting to be the one to send men into space, and now I’ve done that, but my life won’t be even half fulfilled until I can be assured that I get to spend the rest of it with you. Phil will tell him he doesn’t care about fraternization regs and he doesn’t care if he loses his job or his place on the mission now that the ship is in the air, that’s he’s almost singlehandedly responsible for the most impressive manned space mission the planet Earth has ever had, and he’ll be damned if he can’t celebrate that accomplishment with the man he loves and let everyone in the world know. 

And, if all goes well, Clint will say yes.

Phil doesn’t like to brag, but between the mission — his mission, his first real mission, which he’d been slaving over planning for most of recent memory — and the night he has planned, some cosmic force is smiling on Phil Coulson today.

—

Medical reeks of orange-scented disinfectant, and Dr. Blake is just finishing up with the first of the crew members when Phil arrives. Tony Stark is sitting on the examination table rolling his sleeve down and babbling to Dr. Blake, something along the lines of _goddamn, Don, who taught you how to take blood? If you stab me like that on the ship I’ll be sure to rupture the oxygen line to your lab, I’m warning you._

Fury, meanwhile, is standing by observing, arms crossed over his chest, and he eyes Phil suspiciously when Phil ducks quietly through the door. He feels a twinge of guilt at the sight of his commanding officer; had he known Fury would be there, he might have made more of an effort to be on time. 

“Sorry, overslept,” Phil apologizes, shrugging.

“Almost gave Hill your mission,” Fury responds. “Big day to sleep in, Coulson.”

“I know. Won’t happen again, sir.”

Blake looks over his shoulder at him, marking something on his clipboard. “Stark’s in working health. He’s good to go,” he tells Phil.

“Well,” Phil sighs, “if nothing else we’ve got a flight engineer.” He lets himself laugh a little, though it’s mostly relief. There is no reason any of his crew members shouldn’t pass the physical examination, as they’ve been tested regularly once a month since they were picked for the crew, but with the entire mission on the line, he can’t help but worry a little. Sure, they’ve got reserves ready and waiting for one of the crew to come down with a common cold the day of launch, but he had spent months hand-picking a crew he knew would work perfectly together to allow the rescue mission to go down without a flaw. 

Stark pats him on the back as he exits the room, saying, “Good to officially be working with you, ground control. I look forward to hearing your voice bright and early every morning.”

“You’ve got a flight physician as well,” Blake tells him, handing him Stark’s chart and pulling the next one. “Richards did my physical this morning, I’m good to go.”

Phil lets himself smile. “Good. Honor to be working with you, Dr. Blake. Who’s up next?”

Blake doesn’t get the chance to answer. Just outside the door, there’s a loud crash, and Stark’s voice booms, “Jesus, watch where you’re going, Rogers. I don’t want another fucking MRI before they let me on the damn ship.”

“Sorry,” comes the quiet voice of Steve Rogers through the door, which he opens just after. “Really sorry, wasn’t looking where I was going...”

Through the door Phil sees Stark stand back up, rubbing the back of his head where he must have hit it against the wall as he fell. He sees Steve smile sadly, apologetically, and he sees Tony make a face like he’s looking at a kicked puppy in the rain. 

“Uh, no problem, it’s fine,” he says, and then for the first time since Phil has met him Stark shuts up and walks away without a smart-ass comment.

Phil can understand why, too. Not only does Steve Rogers have the kind of face that could launch a thousand ships, but he’s had a sad, faraway look on his face for months now, and today it’s only worse. It’s not without reason — Steve was the pilot and only returning crew member of the Ares I mission. He’d lost friends on Mars, had abandoned his best friend, James Barnes, and his girlfriend, Peggy Carter, still alive but unable to fit in what remained functioning of their ship when Steve managed to get it in flying condition. With the prospect of finding them alive and well on this mission, he’s been more lost in his memories than ever.

Steve sits on the examination table and rolls up his sleeve before Blake can ask him to. It is apparent from the way he grits his teeth and stares at the floor that he’s ready to be done with this, ready to take off and start the 214-day journey to Mars — a journey he hopes will end with finding Barnes and Carter, even if it’s possible they’re already dead. 

“You ready for this, Commander Rogers?” Fury asks as Blake lifts Steve’s shirt and presses his stethoscope to the skin. 

“Breathe deeply for me,” Blake mutters, making a note.

Rogers breathes for a second and then turns his head to Fury. “Never been more ready in my life,” he answers, nodding. 

“Good. We’re glad to have you on board,” Phil says. “Really, it’s an honor.”

Phil has not bothered to keep his admiration for Steve Rogers a secret. He’d been just a lab technician during the first Ares flight, following the mission closely the entire time, and when Steve had managed to reconnect the comm links after three weeks of radio silence and reported that he was the only one who had made it back onto the ship, that Dugan and Jones were dead and Carter and Barnes were stuck on the base, Phil had started creating plans for the rescue mission immediately. 

“Honor is all mine, Coulson, really,” Steve says, wincing only slightly as Blake moves to take his blood.

“Still, we really appreciate your command on this mission.”

“I’m glad you’re letting me go. I swear on my life I’ll bring every man back alive this time, if it’s the last thing I do. And Barnes and Carter, too, provided they’re still alive.”

The look on Rogers’ face — not the lost-puppy look that had knocked the snark right out of Stark, but a sort of silent desperation he’d never utter aloud — nearly takes the breath out of Phil. He can’t imagine what it must have been like for Steve, having to leave the people he cared about most on a compromised base on another planet. The pilots and flight engineers are trained for all sorts of things, emergency situations and dangerous risks, but they aren’t trained well to handle the loss of best friends and crewmates. 

Blake dots the blood onto a sample strip and shakes it in the air, watching the color change from red to a dark green. 

“Everything checks out,” he says, signing off on Steve’s form. “Congratulations, Commander Rogers. You’re going to Mars. Again.”

Steve exhales, rolling down his sleeve and standing up. He salutes Fury and then Phil, who laughs.

“I’m not your superior, Commander Rogers. There’s no need to salute me.”

“You arranged this entire mission. You deserve my respect along with my undying gratitude. I’ll salute you if I feel it’s appropriate.”

Steve smiles at him warmly, or as warmly as possible with that empty look in his eyes, and Phil returns the smile, shaking his hand as he crosses to the door. 

“Who is next?” Fury asks Blake, looking down at the list in his hands.

“Should be Banner,” Blake responds, pulling the next chart. “Then Romanoff and Danvers. Then we’re good to go for launch at oh-four-hundred, all according to schedule.” He removes his latex gloves, disposes of them, and scratches the back of his head. “Provided all goes as well as it has been, we’ll actually be running a bit early.”

“That’s good,” Phil smiles. “The more time we have to triple-check the safety measures, the better off we are.”

Blake slips on a new pair of gloves as Bruce Banner walks in and sits down on the examination table, waving a feeble hello to the other men in the room.

“I survived,” Banner jokes, looking over at Phil weary-eyed as he rolls up his sleeve. “Pym didn’t manage to kill and replace me before launch.” It's a joke they’ve had since the crew had been announced, though not an unsubstantiated one after Hank Pym was heard complaining that he deserved the biology research position over Banner, citing a handful of incidents Banner had been involved in during their time in graduate school together. He had claimed Banner had anger management problems and wasn’t psychologically sound for space-travel, but if anyone isn’t psychologically sound for this mission, Phil has no doubt it was Pym and not Banner.

Banner coughs slightly when told to breathe deeply, and turns faintly green watching Blake draw his blood, but passes his medical tests with flying colors and laughs, shaking his head, when Blake declares, “Welcome to the crew of Ares II, Dr. Banner. I look forward to working with you.”

Bruce’s research involves gamma rays of some sort, and Phil isn’t exactly sure what else, but he was on Project Hestia six years ago with a similar project on the moon, and he’s more reliable than any of the other scientific candidates who had sent in proposals for the mission, so he had been the obvious choice for Phil when selecting the crew. 

“Looking forward to it.” Banner smiles as he leaves, nodding a greeting to Natasha Romanoff, the ship psychiatrist, as she walks in. 

Natasha is a harsh Russian woman who terrifies almost everyone who sees her, but she always greets Phil with a sweet smile and a bit of gossip, and so he’s always liked her. She takes her seat gracefully, winking at Dr. Blake as he asks her to lift her shirt for him and laughing when he turns red.

“Sorry,” he mumbles, but she lifts her shirt and says, “I’m joking, it’s fine.”

She scrutinizes Fury while Blake listens to her breathing, looking him up and down like he has a secret she’s supposed to know, and odds are he does. He’s standing there smirking at her, arms crossed over his chest, tapping a pen against her file on the table. When Blake is finished listening to her heart and lungs, she pulls her shirt down and laughs. “Still haven’t forgiven me, Nick?”

“Not until you’re dead, Natasha,” he says, rolling his eyes. “How’s she sounding, Doc?”

“Lungs and heart are in tip-top shape as always. Mind rolling up your sleeve for me?”

She does without hesitation, but when he picks up the needle, she tenses and turns her head away from her arm, towards Phil. 

“You hear about Richards and Storm?” she asks him, the same mischievous glint in her eye Phil knows accompanies the revelation of top-secret facts she should have no way of knowing.

“What about them?” Phil humors her, watching as Blake preps her arm to draw blood. 

She glances at Fury before answering, and he makes a face that says “I’m not listening to any of this” and suddenly becomes very absorbed in her chart. 

“She’s pregnant, just got booted off the team for the Venus fly-by,” she tells him, smiling wryly and savoring the detail like it’s a hundred-dollar wine. 

Blake sticks the needle in her arm and she winces, but continues, “Overheard the two of them arguing in the break room the other day after she was done with training. Says it’s all his fault.”

“Didn’t know there was something between them,” Phil comments, watching Blake’s puzzled face.

“Sorry, Natasha, gonna have to try again for the vein,” he apologizes, picking up a different needle. 

She grimaces slightly but continues, “I overheard a few select threats on her part that I’m eager to try out on my own at some point. If nothing else, the woman has a way with words.”

Blake holds the needle up, victorious, and dots the blood with one hand while bandaging her arm with the other. He looks at the red-turned-green and smiles.

“Well, after all that, you’re good to go, Romanoff. Welcome to Ares II.”

She hops off the table, rubbing her arm through her sleeve, and winks at Fury. “Can’t stop me this time, Nick. Mars, here I come.”

He snorts as she leaves, tossing her file to the floor, and Blake pulls the final chart from the pile, opening it and prepping his next needle. 

“Just Danvers now,” he smiles, and as if she had been standing outside the door waiting to hear her name, Carol Danvers swoops in.

“Morning Phil, Nick, Don. Ready for the big day?”

Phil smiles. He likes Carol — he likes her spunk and her take-no-prisoners attitude. She’d been the clear choice for pilot after her success on the Hestia mission, even if most of the others thought she was too young to be flying a first mission, let alone a second. She's one of the most dedicated pilots he knows. 

She lifts her shirt for Blake and asks him how his brother’s doing. He responds amicably before asking her to take a few deep breaths, and then suddenly a strange look crosses his face.

“You’ve, uh,” he hesitates.

“I’ve what?” she asks, her face growing concerned.

“Well, you seem to have a diastolic heart murmur.” He coughs, pulling the stethoscope off his neck.

“I’m sorry, I have a what?”

“A diastolic heart murmur,” he repeats, as if that clears up the matter completely. 

“You’re gonna have to break that down into smaller words, buddy.” She laughs, but it’s not her usual laugh. She sounds scared.

“Uh, abnormal passage of blood through the heart. Probably a leaking valve or something. Benign enough a good doctor can patch you right up, but, Carol...” He pauses, biting his lip.

“But what?” She snaps. 

“You’re not going to be able to go on the mission.”

She looks at Phil, a cross between sadness and fear flooding her eyes. “There must be some mistake,” she says. “You’ve got to listen again. I was fine at my physical last month...”

Blake shrugs. “I can listen again, but it’s not gonna make it go away. I’m sorry, Carol.”

“Isn’t there something you can do?”

“The change in gravity would worsen the damage already present. High risk of fatality, and we really don’t need fatality on a rescue mission.”

“We can’t postpone the mission, Carol, or believe me we would. We only come within range of Mars like this once every twenty-six months.”

She swallows and then nods, all military professionalism from her Air Force background. “Yessir,” she says to him and turns to Fury and Phil. “It was a pleasure serving with you both,” she manages through the lump in her throat before turning to walk out the door.

Blake looks up at them, resignation on his face. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I wish there was something I could do.”

“It’s fine,” Fury says, folding a computer screen out of the wall and pulling up a list of files. “We've got pilots who have been through all the training. It’ll be rough to find someone available this quickly, but we should be fine.”

He flips quickly through a list of personnel files, pulling up a series of qualified pilots eligible for the mission. 

“Who have we got?” Phil asks, thinking back to the options they’d had when he was first selecting the crew.

“Drew’s on the list, but she’s in training for the Mercury mission,” Fury begins, reading off names from the files. “Green hasn’t logged enough hours in the simulator, Cage is on probation, Morse is still on medical leave. We could go with van Dyne, but I think Pym would kill her before letting her on the mission he wanted so badly...”

Phil looks over his shoulder at the rapidly dwindling number of options. “If we’d had any clue... We should have blocked off a series of reserves.”

“Barton’s free,” Fury says, pointing at a file on the screen, and Phil feels a strange pain in his chest, like he's the one with the leaking valve in his heart.

“No,” he says flatly. “Absolutely not.”

“Why? He’s eligible, he’s available, he’s one hell of a pilot.” 

“He has no space flight experience.”

“Doesn't need it to be a pilot. He’s logged over three times the necessary time in the simulator. If anyone’s prepared for it, it’s him.”

Phil wracks his brain for an excuse, anything to prevent Clint from going. “Romantic history with Romanoff. Possible conflict of interests?”

“She’s a shrink. I’d rather have her off and him on than the other way around.”

Phil can’t object any more, not without giving Fury his real reasoning, which would ban not only Clint from the mission, but Phil as well, which might as well shut down the mission completely. And so he sighs, resigned.

“Call him in, Blake,” Fury growls, and marches off, mumbling something about “motherfucking paperwork.”

Time slows for Phil, hands locked together, sitting in a chair in the examination room waiting for Clint. His mind races through his proposal speech once, twice, a hundred times in the interim, Blake eyeing him warily from the other side of the room.

“Mission’s still going to go on, you know,” Blake reassures him, and Phil thinks that’s what frightens him the most. 

Barton isn’t shaking when he walks through the door. He gives a curt nod to Phil when he sees him, lifts his shirt on command, breathes in time, rolls up his sleeve when asked, doesn’t wince at the needle piercing his skin. The red of his blood comes back the darkest green Phil’s ever seen on a piece of medical equipment, and before long Blake is saying, “Welcome to Ares II, Barton. Coulson here will show you the ropes and run you through an abbreviated version of the basics before we congregate for launch prep at oh-two-hundred. You’ve been through training with us, so you should be pretty familiar with most of it.”

He points Clint toward Coulson, gathers his files, and leaves the room, and that is when Clint begins to shake.


	3. Chapter 3

“You don’t have to go,” Phil tells him, reaching out to take his hand. The speech he’s been rehearsing is on the tip of his tongue, and he may not have the ring with him and this may not be the romantic setting he wanted, but there is no way he is letting Clint go. 

“Yes, I do,” Clint answers, squeezing his hand back, voice surprisingly firm. “We can’t sacrifice the mission.”

“We can find another pilot.”

Phil’s voice is almost a whisper, so close to breaking he won’t risk being any louder, and every inch of him longs to pull Clint to his chest, to hold him until he stops shaking.

But Clint pulls away. “In the next four hours? No, you can't. We can’t jeopardize the mission,” he says, looking around as if there is anyone else in the quiet room who might have seen them holding hands. “You’re needed down here in charge, and now I’m needed up there. Mission comes first, right?”

It’s something he’s always made fun of Phil for: the insistence that his job and his mission come before everything else. He’d say it, a smile in his eye, on nights when Phil was too busy to stay the night or when he was trying to distract Phil from the work he’d brought home. Or he'd say it with a sigh in his voice, watching Phil from his bed in the blue glow of a spreadsheet on his laptop screen.

This time, though, it isn't a smile or a sigh in his voice. It's quiet resignation and firm determination. It's matter-of-fact, as if after all this time he's realized Phil is right just at the moment Phil is realizing how wrong he has been.

“Screw the mission,” Phil says, stepping towards him, taking him by the shoulders. There are words clawing their way out of his mouth, scary words he doesn't know if Clint is ready to hear. Words like, “I love you” and words like “I want to spend the rest of my life with you,” words he was ready to say two hours ago, but that are now anchored by the pit in his stomach and the fear in Clint's eyes.

“You've been working on this mission for years, Phil.” Clint says quietly. “I'm not going to be the one to ruin it for you. I'm not getting in the way of your dream. It's more important than us, it always has been.”

Phil wants to shake him and tell him just how wrong he is, but instead he says, “It's dangerous.”

Clint laughs a little, shaking his head. “I know. And I'm scared. But you've got your job and I've got mine. And you'll be on the other end of the comm link the whole time, talking me through it, making sure I'm safe.”

Phil opens his mouth to respond, but Clint cuts him off with a salute.

“It will be an honor flying under you, Coulson,” he says, face straight, and then breaks into a small smile. “It's only fifteen months. I'll be back before you know it.”

There is nothing Phil can do, he realizes, watching the crinkles at the edge of Clint's eyes as he smiles. Clint is right – these are their jobs. This is what they signed up for when they were hired and this is what they signed up for when they got involved. Phil couldn't keep Clint on Earth forever. If not Ares II, it would have been the Titan expedition or one of the Kuiper Belt missions a few years down the line. He may not have had time to tell Clint how he felt, to put a ring on his finger or their names on a lease, to say “I love you” or “I want to be with you” or any of the other things Clint had been wearing down towards, but at least Ares II was safe, Phil could be sure of that. And two hundred and fourteen days each way, fifteen months round trip, is much shorter than the flight to Neptune or Io or Mercury. 

So he salutes back, putting on his best mission-control face, and responds, “Pleasure to have you on board, Barton. Shall I show you the ship?”

The ship is closed off until launch-prep begins, as a team of engineers have already begun loading the ship with propellants and the payload, so Phil pulls up the specs on the computer screen in the examination room for Clint. Clint sits up on the examination table, playing absently with a latex glove to keep his hands occupied, and Phil swings the monitor around in front of him and sits next to him, their thighs pressing slightly, almost imperceptibly together on the cold metal.

“We've created a false sense of gravitational force on the ship using rotation,” he explains, outlining the main flight deck on the screen. “So, you'll be able to walk about the living areas, main flight deck, and labs without feeling like you've even left Earth. It's really just a simple centripetal force, caused by the rotation of the quarters around the center spire of the ship.”

Clint nods. He's seen the design before, heard this speech a hundred times as Phil puzzled out the specifics of the ship late at night in bed, bouncing ideas off his half-asleep form. He knows how the ship works, but he isn't supposed to yet, even after going through training with the other crew members.

Phil points again, this time to the center spire. “There is, however, no gravitational force in the spire. This is where the payload is, where most of the engines are housed, that sort of thing. Mostly Stark will be the only one who needs to go here, and he's received an abundance of zero-g training to navigate himself to the engine room. He may need someone to help him out, but the engine room uses magnets to create a false gravitational force as well, so you should be fine once you get in there if you need to help him out for any reason. I don't know how much zero-g training you've had recently...”

“I'll manage if I need to,” Clint responds, and then he points to an area at the end of the spire. “And what's this?”

Phil knows Clint knows what it is. The design of the rescue pod had been the focus of Phil's work for several months alone, figuring out how to balance it with the rest of the ship. The mechanics of leaving the ship in orbit and letting the pod make the journey to the surface, pick up the survivors and any salvageable research, and make it safely back up to the ship, were not easy. Clint has probably heard Phil talk about this specific part of the ship more than he could ever hope to hear anyone talk about anything. He's playing his part well.

“That's the rescue pod,” Phil explains, trying to make the explanation as short and painless for Clint as possible. “It detaches from the ship once the ship is in orbit, touches down to Mars for up to a week, and then reattaches to the ship in orbit to head home. Rogers will be piloting it, but in the case that he is unable, that will be your job. We don't have time to teach you the specifics, but it handles smoothly and isn't too much different from the regular ship's controls or the simulator here.”

He pulls up an image of the control panel of the rescue pod and lets Clint look over them for a minute.

“Looks pretty standard, I think I can handle it,” Clint nods, glancing over them quickly. He slides the glove onto his hand and pulls it off, repeating the gesture again and again, one leg bouncing slightly on the table. Phil recognizes the nervous tic, his need to be moving at all times. It happens when he's afraid, when he's got something he doesn't want to say, and he always has something on hand to play with, whether it's a bent paperclip or a top or the bracelet he always wears on one wrist. Phil knows Clint wants to say something else, but they both know he can't.

“I think that's it, Barton. Unless you've got any questions, the rest is all standard.” He types something quickly onto the computer screen before continuing, “You've got a little over two hours to say goodbye to anyone you might want to before we meet to prep for launch.”

He watches Clint read what he's typed before he backspaces it and shuts down the computer. He watches Clint mouth the words, “I can be in your quarters in half an hour, if you'd like.”

Clint nods and his voice says, “Thank you, sir. I look forward to working with you,” and his eyes say, “Yes, I would like that.”

—

Phil thinks about stopping by his desk and picking up the ring on the way to Clint's quarters. He's got to walk right by command anyway to check in with Fury and make sure they haven't hit any other roadblocks in prep. Alone in Clint's quarters where no one can hear them isn't as romantic as the restaurant he'd picked out, but it's private and it's quiet and in a strange way it would feel more appropriate to them than a traditional proposal.

He goes so far as to putting the ring in his pocket before deciding that it's a bad idea. It's one thing for him to deal with having a lover drifting through space en route to Mars, and another entirely for Clint to deal with a new ring on his finger and all the emotional complications that would entail. He tucks the ring way into the back of the drawer, where he won't be able to see it when he opens the drawer tomorrow.

Fury tells him that everything is looking good, going smoothly, all according to plan. He has Phil initial a couple of things that need initialing and look over a couple of papers that need looking over, and Phil does it all without words, trying to take the least possible amount of time.

Clint is already sitting on the bed waiting for him when he arrives at the door, out of breath from sprinting most of the way there.

“I don't want to leave you,” Clint says as Phil walks through the door and moves to sit next to him. His hands are trembling between his knees and he's staring at the floor, one leg shaking slightly.

“I know,” Phil answers, taking Clint's hands and pressing them to his lips, though in truth he's not entirely sure he did know. Missing the weight of the ring in his pocket, he's also missing the confidence of believing that Clint would have said yes. He's never been sure, not really, with a relationship as secretive and undefined as theirs had always been, what Clint really thought of the two of them, what he really wanted. 

Clint lets out a forced laugh. “I guess I figured we'd have a bit more time before they were launching me off into space.”

“So did I.”

“At least it's a round trip, though. And I can't complain too much about having to deal with someone annoying from command. Better you bossing me around on the other end of a comm link than Brand.”

Phil smiles and Clint closes the distance between them, wrapping his arms around Phil's neck and pressing their lips together, chaste but desperate. His skin is warm, it always is, but now his hands feel as if they could burn straight through Phil where they've come to rest on his back, heavy and firm.

He pulls off Phil's clothes and Phil tugs off his, a slow, tender gesture of unspoken familiarity, and as they lay back on the hard mattress, and Phil feels for a moment like he never wants to be anywhere else in the world.

Devoid of clothes, empty of any pretense, their bodies move against each other slowly, as if the last hour they've got left together is all the time they need. Skin pressed to warm skin, eyes closed, letting their fingers see for them, they breathe in unison. They trace each other's angles with fingers and tongues, memorizing their lover's body to store away somewhere safe for the long nights ahead. 

Breathless, wordless, Clint's gasps are like a gift, his skin like a utopia, his touch is like a messiah, divine and desperate.

Clint presses into Phil, steady and easy, taking his time, and when Phil comes it's with strangled cry and a broken sob against the skin of Clint's chest, hands gripping his arms like he's going to float away. 

The clock next to Clint's bed reads 1:30, and Clint rolls off the bed and pulls on his flight suit. 

“It's gonna be fine,” he smiles, looking back at Phil on the bed, but the smile doesn't reach his eyes. “It's only goodbye for a little while.”

—

“Welcome, crew of the Ares II,” Fury begins, squinting at the crew with his good eye. The six of them are lined up in front of the ship, suited up and ready to go for launch in t minus forty five minutes, the hot August sun sending beads of sweat down their foreheads.

Stark wipes his forehead impatiently, but the rest remain still under Fury's scrutiny.

“You have been specifically selected for this rescue mission due to the exceptional promise you've shown in training over the course of the past few years. Each of you has proven to be the best available person in your field for the mission, so take a minute to pat yourselves on the back and get the ego-trip out of your system while you're still on the ground and can't kill each other with it.”

He looks at them expectantly for a moment, and finally Stark snorts and literally pats himself on the back. 

Romanoff rolls her eyes and says, “We get the point, Nick. Can we move on?”

Fury shoots her a glare before continuing, “Above all, your mission is of utmost importance. Your objective is to rescue Barnes and Carter and salvage whatever research you can from the Mars base without endangering any lives. Anything beyond that is secondary. Understood?”

The crew nods. Phil watches, sweat dripping down the back of his collar and the bridge of his nose.

“This is Phil Coulson, mission command, ground control. His voice will be the only thing tying you to Earth for the next fifteen months, so you'd best start to enjoy hearing it.” Fury points at Phil and cracks one of his rare smiles. “He's going to go over the basics of the mission with you. This should all be review.”

Fury steps back and gestures for Phil to move into his place, and Phil does, taking a deep breath and looking at the crew – at Rogers, at Stark, at Romanoff and Banner and Blake, and stopping, one from the end of the line, not letting himself look any farther.

He looks straight at Natasha as he speaks to prevent himself from looking anywhere else.

“Your journey to Mars will last 214 days,” he begins, and Natasha quirks a smile in his direction. “Once there, Rogers will head down to the surface in the rescue pod mounted to the spire of the ship, retrieve Barnes and Carter, and return. He'll have three days in which to do so before you miss the return window, and then you'll make another 214 day journey home.”

He swallows, tugging at his collar a bit. It's uncomfortably tight and he can barely breathe in this head.

“We're using the gravitational force of the sun as a sort of slingshot to pull you out of Earth's gravity and get you where you need to go. On day 180, Barton will engage boosters to get you away from the sun and headed towards Mars' orbital. It's a small window of time, but I'll be guiding you through it step by step, because if you miss that, you're headed straight back home.”

“And if we can't get everything back to the Ares II during the three day window?” Rogers asks, concern lining his face.

“Barnes and Carter should be brought up first, immediately. Banner will go down with you to look through the research after that, but the rescue mission is the priority. We're going back for them first and foremost.”

Steve nods and smiles over to Banner, who looks as if he is about to vomit. 

“Any other questions?”

Phil scans the line, waiting for a look of confusion, but finds none.

“Alright. Your helmets and headsets all have comm links that route straight to me in ground control, and I'll be controlling cameras we've placed on the flight deck, in the hallways, in your rooms, in the rec room, in the labs, and in the engine room.” Finally, for just a minute, Phil allows himself to glance over at Clint at the end of the line. “Any time you need me, page me over the comm link and I'll be there to answer any and all questions. Clear?”

“Clear,” they chorus, taking their helmets out from under their arms and starting towards the ship.

“Good luck and safe flight,” he nods, before turning and heading for the command center. 

The cams are online when he gets there, and he watches them take their positions for take-off – Clint is already strapped in at the control panel, familiarizing himself with the layout of the controls.

“Coulson, you there?” He asks, paging the comm link. Phil grabs his headset off the desk and puts it on, standing over the table of screens that give him visual access to every inch of the inside of the ship.

“I've got you, Barton. What do you need?”

“Just letting you know I can do this. I know you wanted Danvers on the mission, but I'm not gonna fuck this up.”

“Good to know, Barton,” Phil sighs. “Glad to have you on board.”

Clint turns back and looks up at the camera he knows is just over his shoulder, waving a little.

“Hello, ground control,” he smiles, and behind Phil one of the technicians laughs. “Get used to this face, you're gonna be seeing a lot of it for the next fifteen months.”

“Coulson, launch in ten,” Maria Hill says, approaching the desk with her tablet in hand. “We good?”

“We're good,” he affirms, switching camera views to find Stark and Rogers strapped in on the flight deck. “Rogers, launch in ten. All clear in there?”

“Yessir,” Rogers responds, looking around for the nearest cam to try to create some semblance of eye contact. “Everyone's strapped in. We're ready for launch when you are.”

Phil flips through the flight pattern charts in his screen one more time, holding his breath, trying not to count the seconds that remain until launch.

“You ready for this, Coulson?” Fury asks.

“Never been more ready in my life, sir,” he lies.

Hill taps his shoulder, pointing at the countdown running on her tablet. 

“T minus three minutes,” he says over the comm, loosening his tie around his neck. 

“Roger that,” Rogers answers him, fidgeting slightly in his seat. 

“Check sensors,” he orders, and the technician who laughed at Clint types something into her desktop and says, “Sensors check.”

He could run through these commands in his sleep, but he's still afraid he'll miss something, so he pulls the list up on his screen and reads down it.

“Pressurize internal systems,” he says, and hears the response, “internal systems pressurized.”

“Hydraulic external power to on.”

“External on.”

Behind him, Hill puts her headset on and interjects, “Ninety seconds.”

“Vent one heater control exit.”

“Exit.”

“Eighty seconds.”

“Vent two heater control exit.”

“Exit.”

“Sixty seconds.”

“RCO, report go for launch,” he says, pulling up the camera outside the ship on his display screen, ready to watch the launch.

“Range go for launch,” comes the response.

“Fifteen seconds.”

He looks over at Hill's countdown and switches his comm back to the flight deck.

“Barton, you're go for launch in ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one, go.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> again, all my love to Arielle (for support and proofreading) and to Chaz (for being fucking amazing and making sure I kept on writing every time I thought about stopping)


	4. Chapter 4

Having a lover part-way to Mars is even harder than Phil had initially expected it would be. When he sees Clint, it's through the hazy lens of the camera on the flight deck; when he speaks to him, they are Barton and Coulson and there is no more tenderness or care in their voices than they would offer any other peer.

He misses him, even more than he thought he would. He misses Clint grabbing him in the hallway late at night and pulling him back to his quarters. He misses catching Clint's glance across the gym. He misses sneaking around base like teenagers trying to find an empty room. Being able to see Clint's face and to hear his voice every day makes it even worse.

The ship is busy, surprisingly without a dull moment for the beginning of a journey as long as it is. Banner has delved headfirst into his research already, with Blake assisting him however he can. Sometimes Phil watches them work and tries to figure out what they're doing just to stop himself from switching the camera over to Clint's room. He doesn't know much about biology, but whatever it is, they seem to be making a significant amount of progress only a few weeks in. 

Natasha, when she isn't doing her regular weekly evaluations for each of the other crew members or threatening the other crew members to actually come to their scheduled evals, is reading. She's studying for a third doctorate while on the mission, and her work takes up half the bed in the room she's been assigned, which doesn't seem to bother her as Phil never actually sees her use the bed for sleeping. Adding theoretical physics to her degrees in psychology and medicine is nothing if not impressive, but even that falls short of how impressive her ability to sleep standing up is.

Stark is tinkering with something. When Phil asks, he claims it's a defense system for the rescue pod that he should have ready by the time they reach Mars. Phil sighs and warns him that they aren't using it untested, but he looks straight up at the camera and says, “Coulson, if I am not building something while I'm drifting through space in this godforsaken can for seven months, I am doing to go bat-shit and bring you down with me, so let me build this thing in peace, whether or not you're gonna let me use it.” Rogers tends to lurk in the same room, watching Stark build, at least in the rare moments he isn't looking over the flight patterns and charts Phil has been sending him, making sure he knows the mission detail for detail so nothing can go wrong.

Clint, however, takes up table-tennis.

Not ping-pong. Table-tennis.

“Don't call it that, Coulson,” he remarks one day, the little orange plastic ball bouncing off his paddle and onto the wall of the rec room. Phil almost regrets ever having the table installed. “Twelve year old girls play ping-pong. This is table-tennis. This is a man's game.”

He's quite good, it turns out, after about a day's practice. He can go for hours against the wall without missing a single time, and Phil would be really impressed if it weren't such a useless skill.

“You know, you could do something productive like read a book,” Phil tells him one day, watching him over the comm link. “There are plenty of those on board. I trust you know what one looks like?”

“Ha ha,” Clint says, rolling his eyes and throwing the orange ball at the lens of the camera. “I'm working on my reflexes. Pilot-y stuff, or something like that. Not all of us make a living with our noses jammed inside books or doing paperwork.”

He doesn't know how Clint stands the repetition, but every day without fail the auditory uplink from the rec room is filled with the clinking of a plastic ball against a metal wall and a wooden paddle, just irregularly enough that Phil has to mute the link just to feel as if he isn't undergoing some adapted form of Chinese water torture.

At least, he thinks, it keeps Clint doing something.

But if the ship is surprisingly busy, Phil is shocked at just how dull life in control can be. Most of the technicians are working on several missions at a time, only going into control when there's a glitch or an error or a problem that needs their help solving. Phil, on the other hand, feels like a glorified, over-educated baby sitter, watching them over the cams on and off all day, updating anyone who walks into control of the banal goings-on of life in space.

At least planning the mission, he felt like he was always actively doing something towards achieving the goal. Now he's sitting by, nothing to do but let time pass and hope no one goes crazy.

It's not as if Phil has a family to go home to every night, so he doesn't feel too bad that most nights he feels obligated to stay in command just in case he's needed, taking intermittent naps while the crew sleeps. If anyone's right for this job, this constant waiting and watching, he's probably got the lifestyle for it.

Even his coworkers, when he sees them in the break room, have started calling him a baby sitter. He can tell them where each crew member likely is at any given time, or what they've been up to, or how the research is going, or whether or not anyone has killed Stark yet. They have also lovingly nicknamed his crew "the Avengers," an allegedly no-nonsense team hurtling through space to bring justice to the planet that so wrongly stole away several of the bets pilots and researchers the world had ever seen. It's a joke at first, a catchy name that's quicker and more fun to say than "the crew of the Ares II expedition," but it sticks, and the more Phil thinks about it, the more he thinks it fits.

Even if they aren't really all avenging the deaths of the crew of the Ares I expedition, they've all got something to avenge, something to prove. Banner, trying to prove his stability; Romanoff, trying to prove her loyalty; Stark, trying to prove that he's more than the son of a rich inventor. They're all looking down from the stars on someone at home saying, “look at me now. I can do this, you know.”

Phil likes to think about that when he's feeling discourage or passive or useless, half-asleep at his desk, waiting for one of them to page his comm link with a question. For a minute or two, at least, it makes him feel like what he's doing isn't a pointless waste of time. But then, of course, he stops and wonders what Barton is trying to prove and who he's trying to prove it to, standing in the rec room with a table-tennis paddle in hand, and that's something Phil would rather not think about.

Instead he thinks about how the science fiction movies that put a nice artificial intelligence system on the ship to handle security and questions have the right idea, because making a real person do it is probably the least rewarding job he can think of most days.

—

A month and a half into the journey, he falls asleep at his desk and wakes up to someone softly shaking his shoulder.

“Phil?” a voice asks from behind him, and, still not entirely conscious, he's sure for a second it's Clint's, and he's sure he's at the small table in Clint's quarters, sprawled out over a stack of paperwork, and that the past fifty days have been some miserable dream.

“Coulson, sir, would you mind if I took a minute of your time?”

The he clears his mind, the voice is blatantly not Clint's, not even remotely. It's quiet and feminine, and when he opens his eyes he sees a wave of blonde hair and a small frown.

“Danvers?” he asks, rubbing his eyes and blinking the sleep out of them.

“Sorry, I didn't mean to wake you.”

“It's fine, it's fine.” He looks over the screens quickly, making sure that he didn't miss anything important and that no one is dead, and then lets the desktop go dark, turning in his chair to face her. “What did you need?”

She pauses for a minute, looking down, and then gestures to the screens. “How's the mission going?”

“Boring as all get out,” he says. “But at least that means they're safe. And how's your health?”

She sighs. “My doctor says it's good we caught the murmur when we did. He's put me on some medication that should help, but he's not confident that it will definitely go away.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning I might never fly again.”

She sighs and picks up a stress ball off the desk next to Phil's, tossing it gently from hand to hand as she stares at a stain on the carpet.

“Fury's got me on a temporary assignment in one of the labs for the time being,” she continues. “I think he's hoping to train me up to being a technician so they can at least keep me on the payroll, even if I end up being useless.”

“Carol,” he starts, but she cuts him off.

“I'm not here looking for comfort, Coulson. I'm here to make sure the mission I was supposed to be on is going okay without me. And I'm here because I know you're pragmatic and realistic, and I need your advice.”

“Of course.”

“What do I do if they can't fix it? I'm no good at lab work, the technicians keep giving me tasks I can't screw up just to get me out from under their feet. I'm good at flying, that's what I do. What do I do once I have to give that up for good?”

“You fight for it until you're absolutely sure you can't have it,” he responds simply. “Contingency plans and worst-case-scenarios are great for science, but it's your life, not an experiment. You hope the medicine works, you hope you find a way around the problem, and if, in the end, there's nothing you can do, you keep trying or you find something else that makes you feel like flying does.”

She opens her mouth to speak, but Blake pages the comm link from the med lab then, and Phil gives her an apologetic look before turning to his desk, pulling up the cam, and answering the call.

—

Phil does get days off, even if sometimes Fury has to force him to let Hill take over and go home for the weekend. But home is a one bedroom apartment with a broken stove and a leaky shower head, empty and stale and much too quiet. He has trouble sleeping there, and trouble thinking straight. The best parts of his days off are when they are over and he can go back to base, back to command, and make sure his crew is alright. 

“We received video messages home while you were out,” Hill tells him when he gets back from one of these days off, more tired than he was when he left. 

They're slotted to send these once a month, though there wasn't much to say the first time around. Stark sends them to his best friend, and Air Force pilot named Rhodes who is, allegedly, endlessly jealous that Stark made it to space without him. Banner leaves messages for his girlfriend Betty, sweet little reminders that he loves her and he's safe and he'll be back before she knows it. Blake send a quick message each month to his father and his brother. Fury scans Natasha's first transmission six times over to make sure she isn't sending any secrets she isn't supposed to know, but it comes up clean and after that she stops sending them. 

Clint doesn't send any the first or second month, and Phil isn't surprised. Clint doesn't have any family, so there's no one really to send one too.

That's why it's shocking when Hill hands over a thumb drive and says, “Barton's sending this one to his wife, but we don't have an email or even an address on file for her. In fact, we don't have a wife on file for Barton, but I suppose he is entitled to some privacy. What should I do with it?”

“I'll take it,” he says, taking the drive and slipping it in his pocket. “I've met her once or twice off-base, I can deliver it to her myself.”

Hill nods and leaves, and Phil is alone with his desk, so he pulls up the cam for the rec room, where Clint is diligently hitting a ball against the wall.

“Barton,” he says into the comm, and Clint looks up at the camera without effort. Three months in, they all know where the cameras are located, know where to look when they want to speak to Phil. 

“Morning, Coulson. Nice day off?”

“Lovely.” Phil shakes his head, and Clint moves to sit on one of the couches near the camera. “Got your message, I'm going to run it over to your wife after I get off work tonight.”

Clint smiles. “Thanks, Coulson. Knew I could count on you.”

There are all sorts of things Phil wants to ask, like, “When did we decide your cover was going to be a wife?” and “What do I say when people ask me about her?” and “What is going to happen if you ever decide that maybe you want to actually get married to someone other than this made-up wife?” but he doesn't. He can't say any of that over the comms, and even if Clint had been in the room with him, he's not sure he would have said most of it. 

Instead, he nods, and switches his screen to the lab cam to check up on Banner's research. 

They've made some significant progress overnight, Blake explains when Phil asks how it's going. This far from the interference of Earth's atmosphere, the gamma particles are behaving exactly the way they need them to; it's as if they've crossed some threshold in space that's changed the behavior of the particles almost completely. This is why Phil doesn't like taking days off. 

Banner tries holding the microscope up to the cam to show Phil what he's seeing, but the lenses don't match up right, and so he listens to Banner's explanation instead, wishing he'd taken more than just an intro-level biology course in his first year of college, because it sounds fascinating but most of what Banner is saying goes straight over his head. 

Banner is quiet as a rule, but when he talks it's with such a passionate and elevated excitement that hours pass by like minutes, and when he's finally finished explaining the incredible changes he's seen in the gamma particles, it's nine o'clock Eastern Standard Time in Earth. Phil excuses himself and shuts down his comm link for the night, checking the rotation schedule to make sure someone will be by before long to check in, and packs his things up to go home.

“Figured you'd be staying later after your day off,” Fury jokes when he sees Phil leaving command. 

Phil just responds by holding up the flash drive, and Fury raises an eyebrow.

“Barton asked me to take his video message to his wife.”

“Barton has a wife?”

“Lots you don't know, Nick,” Phil answers before turning to leave. 

Halfway out the door, Phil doesn't think he can stand facing his apartment for the second time that day, especially not with the flash drive burning a hole in his pocket, waiting to be watched. He turns back, making an excuse about forgetting his keys in command, and traces the familiar route along the hallways to Clint's room. The key is still taped to the back of the knob where Clint had always kept it, too lazy to be bothered with carrying a key around. 

Even this room, untouched and unoccupied for three months, has more life in it than Phil's apartment. Clint had left in a hurry, so there are still clothes on the floor, the bed is unmade, and there's a mug of molding coffee on the table. It takes every bit of willpower Phil has left not to curl up on top of the awful mattress and pull the blankets over him just to see if they still smell like Clint.

He sits down at the table, instead, and turns on his laptop. He connects the flash drive, and the video file on it opens and begins to play on its own. 

“Uh, this is on, right?” Clint's voice asks over the computer. His head is turned away from the camera.

Behind him, Stark looks over his shoulder from afar and answers, “Is the green light on? If the green light is on, it's recording.”

Clint turns to the camera to check, and Phil stops breathing. The picture is significantly clearer than any of the on-deck cams, and even though he's seen Clint's face every day since they left, this is different. Almost as if he's in the room.

“Oh, got it, thanks” Clint says to Stark, and then looks straight at the camera and starts to speak. 

“Uh, hi, Jamie,” he says, a smile spreading across his face, and Phil can't help but smile too. _You sly bastard,_ he thinks, laughing to himself at Clint's choice of name. _Only you would give your fake wife my middle name._

“I, uh, well I just wanted to let you know I'm safe.” He stops and sighs, biting his lip and staring at the camera, and then turns back over his shoulder to Stark again. “What am I supposed to say?”

“To your wife?” Stark responds, reappearing in the frame with a large wrench in one hand and motor oil smeared across his face. “I don't know, tell her you love her or whatever guys say to their wives. Go ahead, be sappy, you aren't bothering me.”

Clint laughs a little, turning back to the camera. “Well, that's Stark for you. Kind of par for the course in a day in the life, or whatever. Uh, yeah, I'm safe, I'm having as much fun as a guy can have hurtling through space.”

“Come on, Barton, tell her you looooove her,” Stark sing-songs in the background, and Clint turns red. 

“Shut up, Stark,” he mumbles, but Stark is now waltzing around the rec room by himself, humming some strange mixture of “Here Comes the Bride” and “And I Will Always Love You,” overlapping half-mumbled lyrics, his eyes closed, until he runs bodily into Rogers, who has just opened the door behind him. 

Phil can see Steve's blush, even though the camera on the other side of the room, as he stabilizes Stark by the shoulders and backs up. 

“Sorry,” he says, but Stark just grabs him and continues his waltz, out the rec room doors and into the hall, Steve in tow, singing, “Clint and Jamie sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g!”

Clint laughs for a long moment before turning back to the camera, gazing into it as if he's actually looking at Phil.

“And that's the most eventful thing to happen to the crew of Ares I since take-off,” he says. “So, yeah, don't worry about me. I'm safe. Coulson is...” he pauses, as if trying to figure out how to phrase what he wants to say. “I trust him. He's all business, there's no way he'll let this mission go wrong. So don't worry, and don't miss me too much. I'll see you in a few months, babe.”

He signs off with a wink and a half-hearted salute, like the one he gives Phil in the hallways when they pass each other and can't talk, and the screen goes dark.

Phil sighs and closes the laptop, blinking against the darkness of the room. The bed is hard and cold, but the sheets still smell like Clint, so he curls up, still dressed, and falls asleep without another thought, holding the pillow like it's another body inhabiting the space along with him.


	5. Chapter 5

Around month five it hits him: the intense longing, the physical ache of not having Clint around. 

Of course, there is the deep ache in his chest when he sees Clint on the cams or hears his voice over the comms, sharpened acutely by breathing, or moving, or thinking. The sharp heart-attack sensation, as if a part of him attached to Clint is being pulled from his body by the distance. But on top of that is something else – the hypersensitivity of nerves in his sleep, the chill of every brush of his skin against Clint's sheets at night, the physical need for a lover's touch that haunts his dreams until he wakes up feeling like a fifteen year old and has to decide whether to wash the sheets and risk washing out what remains of Clint's scent. 

He doesn't know which is worse: the emotional longing he feels when he sees Clint on the cams, or the physical longing he feels when he sees Clint in his dreams. But neither one is a particularly desirable feeling with ten months still to go.

 _A third of the way there_ , he tells himself daily when he wakes up, washes himself off, and tries to put himself together to face the day. 

His sleep patterns are fucked. He spends more nights asleep at his desk than he cares to admit, and he doesn't go back to his own apartment more than once a week. He wanders through the hallways like a shadow, exhausted and seconds from disappearing into the walls, a business-like look plastered across his face.

He dreams of an explosion on the surface of Mars rupturing oxygen lines and taking out a lab full of researches. He dreams in low-quality video clips from the Ares I incident, sound-less images of destruction. The insides of his eyelids are stained the red of Mars' sand, and when he wakes, he can almost taste it on his tongue.

—

A beeping wakes him up, and he fumbles for the alarm clock before realizing he's fallen asleep in command again and the beeping is someone paging the comm link. He puts the headset on, eyes still closed, and mumbles a response.

“Coulson.”

“It's Barton. You have the cam on?”

He forces his eyes reluctantly open.

“One second,” he says, looking to the computer screen.

“Rec room,” Clint tells him, and he flips to the camera. Clint is smiling up at the lens, and when Coulson mumbles that he's got it, Clint waves. “You fell asleep in command again?”

“Shut up, Barton,” he grumbles, rubbing his eyes and adjusting the headset, which he has just realized he put on backwards. “Fury got me an ergonomic chair to reward my troubles.”

“Anyone else there?” Clint asks, and Phil looks around before answering. It's nearly two in the morning, though, and the command center is completely empty, dark except for the light coming from Phil's desk. Even the hallways outside have darkened for the night.

“Just me,” he says, and he hears Clint sigh.

“Everyone up here's sleeping soundly already. How late is it down there?”

“Around two,” Phil responds, not bothering to look at his watch. “Shouldn't you be sleeping, too?”

“Couldn't fall asleep, I guess,” Clint says, shrugging. “Bad dreams.”

“You want me to tell you a bed time story?” Phil jokes. “We can get you some warm milk, if you'd like. But I'm not much for singing lullabies.”

Clint is quiet for a long moment, biting his lip and looking at the lens of the camera like he can see Phil right through it. 

“Phil,” Clint says finally, and something about the sound of his first name on Clint's tongue pulls a small, unwitting sob from Phil's throat.

“Fuck, I miss you so much,” he continues, his voice broken and soft, barely audible over the headset. He presses the heel of his hand to one eye and exhales deeply, shaking his head slightly. “I don't know how much longer I can do this.”

“I miss you too,” Phil says back, keeping his voice low despite the emptiness of the office. “A third of the way done.”

“You're counting down the days too?”

“Two hundred and sixty four left to go.”

Clint sighs. “It's lonely up here. Sitting in a tin can far above the world.”

“It's actually not made of tin, it's all carbon nanotubes.” It's a feeble attempt at a joke, half-hearted and half-voiced, and Phil wants to take it back as soon as he's said it, replace it with a more appropriate response. But Clint honors it with an equally half-hearted laugh.

Another pause, and Clint looks down and says, “I wish I could see you.”

“I know.”

“You'd be surprised how hard it is to get any privacy up here. I wake up every morning scared that someone heard me moaning your name in my sleep and they all know.”

Phil frowns. “The added hormones in your food should be working to decrease your libido for the extent of the mission...”

“I know,” Clint says, “they are.” And now his voice has taken on a different tone, growled low from the back of his throat, the one Phil hears when he drags his hands through Clint's hair, and when Clint finally looks back up at the camera, his expression is unmistakeable, pupils blown wide, eyes dark with want.

Phil's first thought is, _Fuck._ His second thought is to wish that he had libido-reducing hormones in _his_ food too, because he's already half-hard just looking at Clint's face through the camera. 

“Can hear you breathing,” Clint says, and yes, Phil is breathing heavily, because if he closes his eyes he can almost feel the low rumble in Clint's throat under his tongue like he's sucking bruises into Clint's skin.

Heat is winding its way tightly around his core and he lets out a slow, shuddered breath, his hands gripping the desk. His screws his eyes shut, trying not to look at the pleading look in Clint's eyes, the way Clint's lips are slightly parted. _Can't do this here_ , he thinks, but his body is fighting him, begging him, and when Clint says, “Want you so bad right now, Phil,” half a whimper caught in his throat, his body wins out.

“Fuck, Clint,” he moans softly, biting his lip. 

Clint moves his hand from the table to his pants slowly, his arm trembling, and Phil mirrors the gesture, following suit as Clint closes his eyes and takes himself in his hand. 

It's slow at first, and Phil keeps pace with Clint, letting out soft, desperate sighs so Clint knows he's still there. The longing in his chest aches, but when he closes his eyes the hundred thousand miles between them seem to condense to a fraction of an inch, and it's Clint's hand on him, stroking him slowly, and the world is reduced to Clint's breath, heavy in his ear. 

Clint tilts his head back with a shaky moan, and for a second Phil feels the impulse to reach forward and capture the sound with his lips until he realizes he can't. Instead, he whispers, “Faster?”

Clint nods and picks up the pace a little, a resolute expression crossing his face, and Phil follows, gritting his teeth, gasping at the feeling of it and drawing a small smile from Clint's mouth.

“You like that?” Clint asks, voice wrecked, smirking at the camera through heavy-lidded eyes.

Phil can't seem to put words together, but he hopes the strangled cry he lets out is answer enough. 

He comes first, vision greying at the edges, and when he does his eyes are wet, his chest shaking. The sound pushes Clint over the edge, too, and leaves him gasping for air.

There is a long moment of silence, a moment during which Phil would usually take Clint's face in his hands and kiss him softly, a moment during which Clint would usually pull back and look Phil in the eye, gaze soft and hazy, like he couldn't look for long enough to be content if they had all the time in the world. 

But Phil can't touch Clint. Clint can't see Phil. And so instead Phil reaches into the drawer of his desk, searching blindly with one hand for a pack of tissues, and Clint sighs, leaning back and staring at the ceiling. 

“Don't worry, Coulson, I'm not going to make you do this every night or anything,” he says, avoiding the camera with his gaze. “I know it's unprofessional or whatever.”

“Clint–” he starts, but Clint is already wiping himself off unceremoniously with the sleeve of the jumpsuit, which had been tied around his waist.

“Get some sleep, Coulson. We'll need you alert in the morning.”

Clint leaves the rec room at the same time as Phil's hand finds something that isn't tissues in his drawer, coming to rest around a small box that fits right in the palm of his hands, and suddenly he feels like he's going to vomit. 

Slipping the ring out of the box and letting the metal weight cold and heavy in his hand, he tries to page Clint's headset, and is met with static. Static means Clint's taken the headset off, means he's left without any means of contact to base. The headsets are biometrically linked each crew member, set only to go static if they aren't in contact with the crew member to whom they're linked. Static means that if something goes wrong between now and the next chance Clint has to put the headset back on, there's nothing anyone can do from Earth to help him.

Phil begins to hyperventilate, flipping through cameras to locate Clint. He's not in the hall outside the rec room, not in his room, not on the flight deck.

“Barton!” Phil shouts into his headset, as if shouting will somehow overcome the fact that the comm is offline and his voice isn't even carrying onto the ship, let alone to Clint's ears. His mind kicks into overdrive, running through every possible bad things that could happen, every situation that could occur between now and whenever Clint puts the headset back on in which something terrible would happen to Clint and he wouldn't be able to help.

He flips through the cameras as fast as he possibly can, searching every room, his stomach clenching, his hand squeezing the ring so hard it practically bruises him. 

It's only a minute before he finds Clint in the lab, back to the camera, sitting with a book in his hands, but with the adrenaline rushing through Phil's veins it feels like hours.

He turns the desktop off, breathing heavily, and drops his headset to the ground seconds before dropping to his knees and reaching for the trashcan. His throat burns as he vomits, and he's not sure what he's coughing up aside from stomach acid as he can't remember the last time he ate. It takes a few minutes for his system to purge itself completely, for his legs to stop shaking enough that he can stand up and wipe his mouth on his shirtsleeve, and by that point he's forgotten about the ring in his hand.

When he stands up and remembers it, he drops that into the trashcan, too.

—

The next morning, Clint's headset is back on and connected, but he doesn't answer Phil's pages. He listens only to direct orders, and then only begrudgingly. He averts his eyes from all cameras and spends even more time in the rec room playing ping pong than most days, intensely focused, beating all his records. 

Phil just wants to ask him what's going on, even if he knows he can't talk about it with technicians all around him, bustling about their work for the day. He tries to push it away, and at nine o'clock Hill waves goodbye to him before leaving, and command has finally emptied out.

He pages Clint again, not expecting a response, and when his impulse is confirmed, he pages Natasha.

“Yes, I know about you and Clint,” she says the second he focuses the camera on her, before he has the chance to speak.

“Ah,” he begins, but she cuts him off.

“He came to me last night to talk. Apparently I'm the type who seems like she can keep a secret.”

He doesn't know what to say, and he's not sure if it's that he knows there are other around and he has to watch what he says, or if he's just not sure how to phrase what he's asking of her, but it's irrelevant, as she keeps talking right over him.

“It's a normal reaction he's having,” she says, “it doesn't mean anything about the way he feels for you. He's not mad at you, not really, and you didn't do anything wrong, and you can't really do anything to fix it. 

“This happens more often than you'd think. Distance means longing, and longing can manifest itself differently to different people, and for Clint it's resentment. Not resentment towards you. Resentment towards the situation, towards the obstacles, towards the distance itself. But he doesn't know how to resent something that isn't tangible. You can't give distance the silent treatment, you can't yell at the situation. And so he's deflecting the resentment by taking it out on you.”

“So what do I do?”

“Nothing. You respect him, give him space, and when he realizes that being upset with you isn't doing anything productive, he'll forget he was ever upset with you and go back to normal.”

“And how long might that take?”

“Who knows?”

Phil sighs. “I need him to listen to me. I'm in charge of this mission, and if one of the crew members isn't able to take orders–” 

“That's why fraternization regulations are in place,” she snaps. “That's exactly why they exist. So that things like this don't get in the way of what we need to do to make these missions work. Don't blame him for that. Just be professional and do your job.”

She disconnects the direct line between their headsets and turns back to the large book in her hands, turning her chair from the camera to signal the end of their conversation.

She's right, he realizes. It wasn't last night that he made his mistake. It wasn't putting Clint on this mission, however reluctantly. It was beginning this whole thing in the first place, letting his feelings drown out the sound of logic and reason in his head. It was letting a pilot steal his heart, letting a pilot drag him to his room, letting it continue on for anything longer than a night. It was letting himself fall in love.

But that's the problem with it all, isn't it? It's a mistake too far gone to fix, and even if he's never said the word out loud, he is in love with Clint, and distance or mission or not, it isn't something he controls anymore.

The trashcan by his desk hasn't been emptied since the night before, and he kneels down beside it and reaches in, finding the ring slippery with his own vomit. He wipes it clean on the cuff of his sleeve and puts it back into its box in his drawer before getting up to take the trash bag to the dumpster outside.

It will be a long time before he gives the ring away, he knows now, but having it is what matters. 

—

“Day 180,” Phil chimes in as cheerfully as he can over the comms one morning, bright and early. “Today's the big day.”

It's overcast on Earth, cold and cloudy, and command hasn't been bustling with this many people since the day of the launch. There are technicians at every terminal, some of them vying for space to sit, each one checking or double-checking something, and the noise is disconcerting to Phil, who is used to the room quiet and nearly empty. 

He pinches the bridge of his nose, trying to ward off the headache he knows is inevitable. 

“Starting now, we've got a three hour window to engage the boosters and change the direction of the ship, and when we're done Stark will begin to reset the boosters for the route into Mars orbit in a month. Where's Barton?”

“In the rec room,” Rogers reports from the flight deck. “Should I go get him?”

“Don't bother, I'll page him,” Phil answers, and types the command into his computer.

“Come on, mom, five more minutes?” Clint groans into the headset, just as Phil switches the camera to see him laying on the couch, head stuffed under several pillows.

“Big day, Barton. We need you on the flight deck five minutes ago.”

“Well shit, can I brush my teeth first at least?”

Phil groans, laughing despite himself. “Report in five or I'll have Rogers carry you there.”

“Avengers,” Fury's voice booms, and Phil has no idea when he appeared behind him, headset already on and ready to go. “Today's the day. We miss this, you've gotten yourself a one-way trip back home with a failed mission on your consciences. Are you prepared for this?”

“Fury, darling, I was born ready,” Stark jokes from the flight deck, leaning back in a chair with his feet propped up on a computer screen. His boots can't be doing good things to the LCs, but at least he's present and awake, so Phil gives him a pass. “How about you, Steve, you ready to go find your girlfriend?”

Rogers passes Stark and the two exchange a strange glance Phil can't read from where he's sitting, and then Rogers shakes his head, takes his seat next to Stark, and says, “Roger that, Director Fury.”

Clint comes running in, flight suit around his waist, toothbrush still in his mouth, and says, “Did I make it in time?”

“Stand down, Barton, this isn't a daycare center,” Fury growls, and Phil would be happy to swear that Clint visibly jumps at the voice in his ear.

“Yessir,” he says, taking his seat behind the control panel. He sets the toothbrush aside and zips up his flight suit, and Stark gives him a look, to which he shrugs and responds, “They threatened me with you, what did you expect?”

Fury nods to Phil, and Phil nods back, switching his comm link to public.

“Alright, Barton,” Phil says, voice steady. “This shouldn't be too complicated a process. While I would have preferred you have a little practice under your belt here, I've got faith that you can handle this. How are you feeling?”

“Ready when you are, sir.”

Phil turns back to the technicians in command. “And you all? Are we all set to go?”

“Roger that,” on of them says, and he looks over at a couple computer screens to make sure they're all queued up, but something catches his eye.

“Are you playing computer games?” He asks a thin blond technician he doesn't recognize.

“Oh, is that Josh?” Stark asks excitedly over the headset. “Josh, are you playing Galaga again?”

“Sorry,” the man Phil presumes to be Josh says quietly, and switches his computer screen back over to the proper channel. 

“Okay,” Phil says, hands on his desk, watching the camera on his desktop. “Barton, we're going to engage fuel, prep the boost engines, and unlock the release, then Stark is going to disengage the safeties from where he's sitting, and you'll aim and then release the engines on my count. Roger?”

“You got it, sir. Just like playing a video game, right?”

Rogers clears his throat, clearly not appreciating the levity with which Clint is taking the situation.

“Sorry, Cap,” Clint covers his tracks, half-heartedly. “I babble when I'm nervous. Don't mind me. I'm trying me best, I promise.”

Stark barks out a laugh, and it suddenly occurs to Phil that were Stark and Clint to team up on anything, he's not entirely sure the world would make it out alive. 

“Alright. Ideal boost in T minus ten minutes.”

Phil flips screens, pulling up shared screens of each of the other computers in the room to surround the cam on flight deck. He quickly checks each one quickly for Galaga before swapping out the flight deck cam for the fuel maintenance diagrams.

“Engage fuel,” he says, watching the display closely.

There is a sound of typing and someone behind him says, “Fuel engaged.”

He watches the gauge on the screen deplete as another one fills, slowly, like a trickle of fuel, and he straightens his tie with one hand to calm himself. He knows this is a tricky process, knows it needs patience, but he just wants it to be over with.

When the gauge drops to zero, he sighs and says, “Confirm. Fuel engaged.”

“Confirmed.”

“Prep boost engines.”

He can hear the faint whirring of the engines coming online on the ship through Clint's headset. It must be thunder-loud there for him to be able to pick it up.

“Couldn't have made these a little easier on the ears?” Clint jokes.

“Engines prepped.”

“Unlock the release,” he requests, flipping screens again.

“Release unlocked.”

“Stark, disengage safeties.”

“It would be my pleasure, Phil,” Stark answers, already typing away on the screen in front of him. “Just give me one– there. Safeties disengaged. We are go for boost on this end, sir.”

“Okay Barton, ready to aim?”

“Just like a video game,” Clint says again, quieter this time, an almost imperceptible tremor in his voice. He squints closely at the screen, fingers tracing out a pattern on the controls, breath shallow. Phil watches Clint's screen on his own, following the movements of Clint's instructions as he sends them, and after just a minute, Clint sighs, “Aim confirmed. Ready for fire?”

Phil looks at his watch. “T minus one minute to ideal boost. Hold fire.”

He breathes, counting seconds in his head, and then, “Ready for fire in five, four, three two, one, fire.”

Clint presses the button, holds a second, and then says, “Fire confirmed. Engines released.”

Behind him, technicians start to clap. Fury congratulates them on a good boost, Hill begins giving Stark instructions, sending him down to the engine room to go ahead and start prepping the engines for boost into Mars orbit in T minus thirty one days, and Phil stares at the screen, ears pounding with adrenaline, and watches Clint look up at the camera and smile for him.

People start to filter out of the room, headed back to their own work for the day, but something stops them.

“Hold,” Rogers says over the comm link. “We've got an unidentified incoming signal here. Command, do you copy?”

“We copy,” Fury says. “Ain't us, whatever it is. Can you decrypt it?”

“It's decrypted already, sir,” Rogers confirms. “Open transmission reading on all channels. We're going to open if. Confirm?”

“Confirmed.”

The transmission reads only as static at first. Rogers stands over the screen on the flight desk, typing a few commands in to try and intercept it clearly, and Stark gets up to join him, taking over the controls.

“One second, it's been corrupted. I can get the data, just give me a minute.” He continues to type for a second before looking up at Rogers and saying, “This transmission's been looping for three and a half years, Cap.”

“Play it,” Rogers orders, and Stark does.

“Ares? Do you copy?” a voice says, but the screen remains dark. “Ares, this is Barnes. Do you copy?”

A small light cuts through the darkness, likely a weak flashlight or headlamp, and a face becomes visible. Phil recognizes it instantly – James Barnes, from the crew of the Ares I. 

“Ares, do you copy?” the voice repeats, firmer this time. “Ah, fuck it. Ares, this is Barnes. There's been an attack on Mars base. Attackers... unidentified. Unidentifiable. They've compromised the entire base except for the main lab, which I've managed to seal off access to.”

The dark that is obscuring him clears a little more, so his whole body can be seen except one arm, but when he shifts a bit in his seat, trying to reposition the light, Phil realizes it isn't that the dark is obscuring his left arm, it's that there simply isn't one there.

“I've been wounded, nothing serious, and I've got enough food, water, and oxygen in here to keep me sustained for up to four years, but I'm afraid that's all I can do. Ares, please, if you're receiving this, send help. It's–” Barnes' voice cracks slightly, but he swallows and continues. “It's just me up here. They, um. They got Peggy. She's gone. They got her. Peggy's dead.”

Rogers exhales, his eyes pressed shut, his head bowed low and his hands gripping the edge of the control panel. 

“Ares, if you can hear me... Steve. If you can hear this. Please. Send help. I've got the research, I just need–”

The transmission cuts off abruptly, and Phil swears he hears Steve over the comms, mumbling, “We're coming, Bucky.”


	6. Chapter 6

Steve sits in silence, head down, elbows on his knees, for ten minutes before Natasha speaks. 

“Keep an eye on Rogers,” Fury had ordered, and so Phil keeps his camera trained on the commander when he'd usually be flipping between rooms, checking in on the whole crew and keeping them tied to Earth with a cheerful conversation or a helpful note. It's been this way for over a week, since they received Bucky's transmission, and nothing has changed.

It's late afternoon now, the time Phil usually checks in with Bruce and Don in the lab to see how things are going, but instead he's watching Steve's mandatory psych eval, a clipboard in front of him as if writing down what he sees will be any more useful than Natasha's analysis.

At the ten minute mark, she glances at her watch and shifts her position in her seat, as if she's determined that ten minutes is long enough to let him sit.

“Have you been eating?” she asks, her voice flat, clinical.

He nods.

“Sticking to the dietary plans base sent us?”

“Yes.”

“Good,” she says, making a mark on the paper in front of her. “Sleeping okay?”

“No worse than usual.”

"And how bad is usual?"

He takes a deep breath and then recites it by rote, as if this is something he's told a million psychiatrists. "Sporadic nightmares, the occasional night terror, sleep paralysis. Nothing too bad. Nothing I can't manage."

She looks up from her paper and quirks an eyebrow at him. "Nightmares?"

"Yeah, um, flashbacks. To the mission. Or ones where they all die and I have to watch and there's nothing I can do to help them. I've lived with them this long. They don't, you know, impede my ability to perform the duties for which I'm responsible.”

She takes a deep breath and taps her pen against the table for a minute before continuing. “What can you tell me about the first Ares mission?”

"There was... unexpected interference. We were supposed to be on Mars for two years -- giving our scientists plenty of time to finish their research in the base before we shuttled everything back up to the ship so we could go. Three months in, there was a pretty nasty sandstorm that knocked out the power in the base, destroyed our backup generator. We lost contact with the science wing, and by the time Bucky'd gotten the power back on, they were dead. Something had ripped up part of the lab and killed everyone but the three of us. The security cameras were destroyed, burned, so we couldn't access them to find out what had happened. So we picked everything up, moved it into the parts of base that hadn't been destroyed, and waited for Earth to make the call that we could shuttle up and come home."

“And what separated you from Carter and Barnes?"

"We'd used most of the fuel from the rescue pod to start the power back up on the base. There was only enough for one return trip up to Ares, and... Well, there was another sandstorm. Pretty commonplace for Mars, but Bucky and Peggy couldn't get out of base and into the pod in time, and the power was running down. So they told me to leave them and get help." He rests his head in his hands, smoothing lines across the bridge of his nose with his fingers, but his voice remains determined and steady. "I shouldn't have left them. I-- I knew I should have stayed, but--"

”Steve,” she interrupts him. “You couldn't have done anything about the sandstorm."

"I-- Well, no, you're right, I couldn't have done anything about that. But, damn it, I was their commander and I left them! I abandoned them. There must have been some way I could have gotten them back safely, there must have been something more I could have done."

"Do you believe there was another way?"

He looks at her for the first time since he's sat down, straight on, his face set in hard resolution. “There's always another way.”

She looks at him and opens her mouth to respond, but he cuts her off, a small smile painting itself over his face.

“Dr. Romanoff, I know what you're going to say. I've met with enough psychiatrists, psychologists, therapists, and counselors to know that you're going to assure me that this isn't my fault, that it's a hard thing to recognize, that there's no right or wrong way to handle this, that grief is natural and time will heal everything. I know this already, I've heard it before. I don't mean to waste either of our time.”

He's up out of his seat, already halfway to the door before she speaks again.

“No,” she says, unwavering. “I was going to say that your resolve is impressive and I don't want to interfere with that. But the second this begins to interfere with your ability to command this mission and your ability to keep this crew safe, you need to tell me.”

“Of course.”

She gestures for him to sit back down, and he nods, following her order; when she tilts her head towards him, signaling that he should continue to speak, he does.

“I was a soldier for years,” he says. “If there's anything I can do, it's take orders regardless of my own emotional state. I know it's your job to make sure I don't think what happened with Ares is my fault, I know you're supposed to help me be stable and cope with it in a healthy way.”

“My job,” she says mildly, “is to make sure you're in a healthy enough condition to do your job.”

“Right. But the thing is, I've been coping with this for a long time, and it's never gotten in the way of my work. Really, I don't think I ever truly believed I'd be able to bring both of them back.”

She sighs inaudibly and leans towards him. “You'll come to me if there's anything I can do?”

“I will.” He stands up, and she moves to stand in front of him, her head tilted up to make eye contact, and she reaches out a hand to rest on his arm, softly. 

“We can send someone else down to Mars, if you aren't comfortable with it, Steve. You can stay here on Ares if you'd like.”

He shakes his head, smiling appreciatively. “Thank you, really, but I've got to do this. I have to make sure I'm doing everything in my power to get Bucky back and keep all of you safe.”

Phil's clipboard is still empty when Steve leaves the room, and apparently so is Natasha's because she throws the top sheet away and stores it back on her bookshelf. Neither of them need notes to know that, Peggy's death or not, Commander Rogers is nothing if not the right man for this job.

—

Steve's taken to spending most of his time on the flight deck reviewing charts and plans and patterns at all hours of the day, and when he's not there he's mostly in his quarters. Phil doesn't think he'd ever even go into the mess hall or the rec room if he didn't have to cross through both of them to get from one place to the other.

He eats, he sleeps, he says hello when he passes the other crew members, but that's the extent of it until Tony catches him one day on his way through the rec room.

Tony is tinkering with a piece of the engine he's determined needs repairing, and he's told Phil several times he much prefers bringing pieces up to where he can sit on a couch instead of worrying about the magnet-induced gravity malfunctioning and sending his work flying everywhere in the engine room. 

Steve walks by like a man on a mission, head down, avoiding eye contact with the cameras, and Tony calls out, “Cap, you got a minute?”

He looks up, surprised, like he hadn't even been aware there was someone else in the room. He responds hesitantly.

“Sure, Stark. What do you need?”

Tony pats the couch next to him. “Pop a squat, I got a couple of questions about Mars while I work on the engine here.”

Steve nods, lips pressed together in a thin line, and sits on the edge of the couch, like he's ready to bolt at any moment. “Alright, shoot.”

“What're the sandstorms like?”

Not even Phil knows what Stark is thinking when he asks it, and it seems to hit Steve as a strange question as well, as he takes almost an entire minute to puzzle out his answer before saying, “They come out of nowhere.”

He rubs his hands together between his knees, caught in the memory.

“You know how the air gets thick before a summer storm on Earth, like a warning? There's no warning for these but the sound -- like a million locusts, like there's glass flying everywhere, and suddenly the air is dark and filled with sand, everything is red. There's too much wind to walk a straight line and too much sand to see more than a few inches in front of you. It's like a walking nightmare come to life. They leave you completely helpless and completely defenseless.”

Tony nods. “That's what I thought.”

Steve looks at him, an eyebrow raised.

“That's what your nightmares are about, right? The sandstorm. That's what went wrong?”

“How did you–?”

“Your room is right next to mine, Steve. You talk in your sleep.”

Steve settles back into the couch a bit, looking down. “How much do you hear?”

Stark shakes his head. “Not much. Just enough to know it sounds bad. Enough that I usually think about going over and waking you up.” His voice gets quieter as he continues, “I know how bad nightmares like that can be.”

They're both quiet for a moment, looking away from each other, and suddenly Phil feels a bit like he's intruding on something – something quiet and private and strangely intimate for two men sitting on a couch looking in opposite directions.

“You were in love with her, weren't you?” Stark asks finally, and instead of raising his defenses at the intrusion, like most people do when Stark asks a question that out of line, Steve just lowers his head and says, “Yes.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Me too.” Steve shifts, his body angling towards Tony's. “I'd been in love with her for years. Since we were both soldiers. She'd finally agreed to go out dancing with me once the mission was done. But all that feels like it was a lifetime ago.”

Phil expects Stark to laugh or scoff or say, “Dancing? Who are you, my grandfather?”

But he doesn't. Instead he puts down the engine piece he's been tinkering with and leans forward, putting his hands on top of Steve's clasped ones.

There's something about the softness that crosses Stark's face and the way he holds Steve's hands between his that makes Phil's heart ache, and surprisingly not for Rogers this time. He's never seen Stark's face without a line of jest or sarcasm or mockery until this moment, and he's certainly never before seen it with anything close to what he might call compassion.

“Here, can I show you something that might make you feel better?” Stark asks, pulling Rogers up by the arm and dragging him bodily from the rec room to the flight deck. The camera auto-follows them, as Phil's finally learned to set his desk so that it will switch cams as people move through doorways if he wants.

Stark picks up a metal disk roughly the diameter and slimness of a pizza, and hands it to Rogers, who takes it gingerly. Phil is sure his expression would be scrutinizing if it weren't so uniformly blank.

“I've been working on this for ages,” Stark says, with uncharacteristic hesitation in his voice, a strange yearning for approval Phil recognizes from his own speech patterns. “It's uh... Well, here,” Stark continues, taking the disk back. “Maybe it would be better if I showed you.”

He keys a four-digit code into the lock on the top of the disk, and a hazy blue light starts to glow around the circumference, producing a low-frequency hum that, though the comms, raises the hair on the back of Phil's neck. The light expands hesitantly, moving faster when Stark types in a different four-digit code, and begins to encircle them in a messy web-like cage of light. 

“Try to touch it,” Stark says, and Rogers reaches a hand up to move through the light. It stops him, like a physical barrier, and he looks curiously at Stark.

“What is it?”

“I'm going to put it on the rescue pod when we get to Mars,” Stark explains, his mouth twisting. “Theoretically, nothing should be able to get through it. Especially not a sandstorm.”

“How?” Steve asks, taking the disk from him and looking at it skeptically.

“Eh, it's boring theoretical bullshit you probably wouldn't want to be bothered with,” he answers, and Phil has never known Stark to pass up an opportunity to bother someone with his boring theoretical bullshit.

“It's–” Steve starts, before closing his mouth and puzzling out the words. When he speaks again, his voice is low. “Thank you, Tony.”

“We're going to find him, Cap,” Stark says, punching in a code to disable the disk.

Steve nods, looking at him with a gaze Phil can't read. “I know.”

—

With a week left until the boost into Mars orbit, the only problems Phil is expecting are complaints from Stark about the prep of the boost engines. There are shockingly few of those, though, and Stark is mostly working quietly and competently. The efficiency with which he works is honestly quite terrified and Phil is reminded daily of the very good reasons he had for selecting Tony Stark above anyone else as the flight's engineer. 

He's ashamed to admit that when he walks into a hectic command center early one morning after a restless night off base, he automatically assumes that Stark's negative reputation has come back to bite him.

It's not the engines, though, he realizes, looking over the shoulders of frantic technicians to search for clues on their computer screens. It's the lab.

Fury is at his desk, looking down at the cam feed of the lab, and Phil peers over his shoulder at it, Blake's voice frantic over the headset as he puts it on.

“I don't know what went wrong,” Blake is telling Fury, and Phil can see the problem immediately.

The lab is wrecked, papers shredded and strewn across the floor, glass vials and beakers shattered, one of the metal tables overturned completely. There's an impressive dent in one metal wall, and the books that line the bookshelf on the other wall are scattered across the floor, bent and torn. 

“What the hell happened?” Phil asks, to no one in particular.

Fury turns to him and says, “nice of you to come in this morning, command. I'm letting you deal with this shit,” before turning on his heel and walking straight out the door.

“I don't entirely know,” Blake sighs, like it's the eighth time he's explained this. “We opened the lab this morning, and the incubator had been left open. All our samples, our control group, and all the successful trial runs we've had are dead.

“Bruce, uh, didn't exactly react well when he realized what had happened. He– well, maybe it's better if you see it. Fury saved the video file to your desktop, I believe. It should be there.”

“Thanks,” Phil tells him, and cuts the link before switching screens, searching for the file.

It's almost painful to watch; he's not sure if it's the destruction that hits him so hard, or the desperation in Bruce's face as he causes it, but he silently thanks God that there's no sound on the video feed so he can't hear what he knows must be a raw, painful scream as Steve and Don drag Bruce out of the lab, almost unable to pull him. 

When he turns his comm link back on, Don tells him, “That was everything. All the research – there's no way to start it over, we've lost it.”

“Where is he now?” Phil asks.

“His room. Natasha's trying to talk to him, but he won't say anything. He's calmed down a bit, but it's not looking good...”

“Thanks, Don,” he sighs, glancing at the camera from Bruce's room to watch him stare at the floor for a few seconds.

Instead of trying to talk to Bruce or Natasha, Phil finds Clint in the rec room. He's on the couch, a book in his hands.

“Reading?” Phil asks, skeptically. 

Clint shrugs, propping the book on his chest and glancing up at the camera. “Didn't want the noise of the table tennis to bother everyone. We're all a little on edge.”

“Understandably so.”

“I don't know who's more off about the whole thing, Bruce or Blake. I can't imagine what it must've been like, having to watch that.”

Phil watches him as he stands up and puts the book back on the shelf and picks up a water bottle.

“And how are you holding up?”

“Me? I'm grand, Coulson.”

“I mean it, Clint,” he says softly, covering his hand with his mouth and putting his head down, hoping the other techs are too busy with their own work to notice him.

Clint sighs, looking straight at the camera. “I'm fine, I promise.”

Phil nods, forgetting for a second that Clint can't see them, but somehow Clint seems to know without words. 

—

Bruce is on lockdown until they hit Mars and need him again. Natasha's prescribed something that keeps him calm, and he mostly sleeps, only getting up when she brings him food for him from the mess hall three times a day and watches to make sure he eats it. 

The rest of the crew, however, is kicking into action for the boost into Mars orbit.

“Remember,” Phil tells them on the public comm link when he gets in the morning of, with only three hours to go before their hour-long window to activate the boost opens. “It's a small window, but we've done this successfully one time already, so there shouldn't be any issues.”

“Can I have a word, Coulson?” Fury asks, and he nods and orders Stark and Rogers to start checking over everything, making sure the ship is go for boost while he's gone.

“What is it, Director Fury?”

“Banner.”

“He's on lockdown, doing much better. Natasha says–“

“I'm not asking how he is. I'm asking why you brought him on. You knew his reputation, you knew he was unstable, and yet you selected his research over Pym's knowing full well the risk you were taking, and now it's come back to bite you in the ass. So what is it?”

Phil sighs. He's been justifying this decision in his mind for days – no, he's been justifying this decision to himself since he made it.

“Pym's not a team player. You put him up on the ship, his research becomes the number one priority, and frankly it wasn't nearly as impressive as Banner's. Pym particles are one thing, but Banner's gamma research is unparallelled, and he made a better case for needing the mission to do it. This hasn't jeopardized the mission, I don't regret selecting Banner over Pym. I'd do it again in a heartbeat. I trust him.”

Fury nods. “As long as you feel that way, but if this gets in the way of his performing his duties on Mars, I've got your statement recorded, and it's your head on the line.”

“Gladly,” Phil says, mouth tight, and then he turns back to his desk, putting the headset back on.

He sets himself back to work, and before he knows it, he's paging the public comm link, saying “T minus thirty to idea launch. All hands on deck.”

He runs through the routine, much more at ease than with the last boost. Calls for the fuel to be engaged, calls for the boost engines to prep, signals for the release to be unlocked and the safeties to be disengaged with a few minutes to spare.

Clint aims the boosters and waits for the countdown, and as soon as they hit the ideal boost window, Phil calls, “You are go for fire.”

Clint obeys, firing the boost engines, and then pauses.

“Um,” he says, and then fires the boost engines again.

“Status report, Barton,” Phil commands, unsure of what is going on.

“Something's not right. They aren't launching, or engaging, or...” He trails off, beginning to type quickly into his screen, and Phil follows suit, pulling up the ship's realtime schematics.

“T minus fifty nine to end of boost window,” Phil reports under his breath, scanning over the schematics as quickly as he can. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Stark move to stand behind Clint, examining the schematics from his end.

“Gotcha,” Stark says under his breath, and then pages Phil to report. “We've got a jam in the fuel line. I can try to fix it from here, but we're gonna have more luck manually. What's your call, Coulson?”

Phil swallows, looking at the jammed fuel line Stark is pointing to. “How long will it take to try it out remotely?”

“Thirty, thirty-five minutes max. If it fails, we've got no time for a manual attempt before the window closes.”

“Better make it manual,” Phil decides, and Stark is already running out of the flight deck, unzipping his flight suit and grabbing his tool kit.

“I'll go with,” Clint says, standing, but Phil cuts him off.

“We need you up here and ready to engage the boost as soon as he's got the line unjammed. Rogers, can you help Stark out?”

“Of course,” Steve says, and he's out the door after Stark before Phil can exhale.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Along with all of my usual "thank you"s and also a really huge thank you to all the amazing people who have been reading and commenting and who have stuck with me this long already, I've got a few notes to make.
> 
> See, the lovely incredible Chaz has made both some incredible [fanart](http://chazkeats.tumblr.com/post/25277657471) and a really beautiful [fanmix](http://chazkeats.tumblr.com/post/25309479571) for this fic, which are both RIDICULOUSLY COOL AND YOU SHOULD ALL GO LOOK AT THEM.
> 
> So, yes. That. Notes. Good.


	7. Chapter 7

Phil is still amazed at the ease with which Stark maneuvers his way in zero-g, slingshotting himself down the spire towards the engine room with minimal effort. Rogers is a bit slower, steadily guiding himself with his hands the whole way, his bulk not quite a streamlined as Stark's slim body.

But it's mere minutes before Stark's sitting of the floor of the engine room, one wall opened up to reveal the innards of the ship, moving wires aside to find the jammed fuel line. He sticks his head into the wall, holding back tubes and wires to make room for his head and the wrench he's stuck between his teeth.

Phil switches cameras from the flight deck to the engine room to follow him, keeping the public comm line open to make sure nothing happens on the flight deck while he's not watching.

“Can you hand me the slip-joint pliers,” Stark asks, voice muffled by the wrench but still clear, and he gestures with one foot towards the tool kit on the floor next to him.

Rogers hurries in from the doorway, shutting it behind him, and dodges around a hole in the floor that Phil can't see from the cam but knows from the ship's designs that it contains the ship's motherboard, submerged in a vat of coolant to keep it from overheating. 

“Which pliers?” Rogers asks again, and Stark lets out a vaguely annoyed groan, but refrains from making a snarky comment like Phil would expect.

Instead, he just says, “The slotted ones,” and sticks his head farther into the wall, shouldering the wires held by his right hand so he can reach out for the tool.

Rogers hands it to him, hovering awkwardly between the wall and the tool kit, waiting for his next instruction.

Phil sighs, resting his forehead on one hand. There's nothing to do now but wait and pray that Stark can pull this off before the boost window closes.

“T minus thirty six,” he reports, glancing at the countdown displayed on the screen.

At the desk next to him, Sitwell pushes a full mug of coffee towards him and offers a sympathetic smile.

“Thanks,” Phil says, taking it.

“What?” Stark answers.

“No, sorry, wasn't talking to you. How's it looking in there?”

“Not great, but definitely fixable.” Stark slides back out of the wall and addresses the camera, taking the wrench out of his mouth to speak. “Gasket rusted a bit and came loose, I'm gonna have to put in a new O-ring and then try to realign the pieces...”

“Less talk, more work, Stark,” Fury barks from behind Phil. “We don't need to know what you're doing as long as it works.”

Stark gives him a thumbs up and sticks the wrench back into his mouth, disappearing into the wall again. Phil stares down into his coffee and reports, “T minus thirty.”

Phil would think that the seconds were dragging on if he weren't so acutely aware of exactly how fast actual seconds were passing, staring at the countdown in from of him like staring would slow it down any. It's almost ten minutes before Stark emerges again, victorious, rusted gasket in hand, and tosses it to Rogers. 

“It's a bitch in there, Coulson,” he reports. “Next time, you have me design your ship. I'll make you something a guy can actually work with in a crunch, swear to God.”

Phil laughs weakly. “You fix this in time,” he bargains, “you design everything I ever need designing for the rest of my life.”

“I'm holding you to that,” Stark says, setting the gasket aside and shouldering his way back through the gap he's made in the wall. “Steve, pass me an O-ring? Uh, gray, shaped like a really thin donut.”

Steve searches through the tool box for a minute, and Phil groans, “T minus nineteen.”

“Rubber?” Steve asks, holding up something from the kit.

“Technically, it's elastomer, but yeah. Here, hurry up.”

He takes it from Steve's hand, and another voice cuts through over the comms.

“How we doing down there, Coulson?”

It's Clint, so Phil risks briefly cutting over to the flight deck cam to see what he needs. “Getting there,” he groans, “slowly but surely. Everything good on flight deck?”

“In position for boost the second Stark gives me the go-ahead,” Clint confirms.

“Good work, Barton.”

Clint is silent for a minute, and Phil moves to switch cams, but Clint looks up and catches his gaze.

“Hey,” he says softly, more affection in his voice than is proper for the public comm link, but it slows Phil's heart incrementally, to the point where he no longer feels seconds off from cardiac arrest. “It's gonna be fine.”

Phil swallows, hoping against all hope that Clint is correct.

“Hey Coulson?” Stark asks, his voice strained, as Phil cuts back over to the engine room cam. “What happens if we miss the window?

“We re-chart your flight paths and take you around the sun again, most likely,” Phil responds, and he hears Tony grimace while barking out a dry laugh.

“Right. You know, I've always wanted to get stuck orbiting the fucking sun.”

“Technically, you've been orbiting your sun the whole life,” Phil supplies, hoping to draw a real laugh out of Stark, ease some of the tension visible in the awkward shift of Tony's legs as he maneuvers half inside the wall. 

Instead he just asks, “You got a time for me, Coulson?”

“T minus fourteen.”

Stark emerges from the wall and lets out a loud groan, curling into himself and grabbing at his hair. “It's not enough time!” he all but shouts, and suddenly Rogers is kneeling by his side.

Phil had almost forgotten Rogers was there, standing by the wall, unimposing, waiting to be of use.

“Tony,” he says, voice soft, steadying Stark with a firm hand on his back. “Hey, it's fine. Fourteen minutes is plenty of time.”

Tony pulls away from his touch, but he persists.

“You're the same guy I watched re-assemble a car engine from scratch in five and a half minutes during training and actually made the car work significantly better than it had originally, aren't you?

Stark swallows and nods, not looking at him.

“Then this is nothing. Fourteen minutes is all the time in the world.”

“Thirteen,” Stark corrects him, and without a moment's hesitation is back in the wall, shouting out orders.

“Okay, I'm gonna work this in here, but I need both hands and my mouth, so I've got to give the wrench to you for long enough that I can jam it in while holding this wire aside, and then I need it back almost immediately. Think you can manage that?”

Steve nods before realizing Stark can't actually see him, and quickly corrects himself with a vocal affirmation.

“Yes.”

“Okay,” Stark says, shifting a bit to pull his arm out of the wall. “I'm gonna toss this to you, and then you're gonna toss it back, yeah?”

He's throwing the wrench before Rogers can respond, aiming a little too far to the left of where Rogers is standing.

Rogers tries to stop him, holding up his hands and starting, “Tony, no, don't–”

Phil can't see what's happening, but if his hearing is correct, what cuts Rogers off is a splash.

 _That can't be right,_ he thinks, scrutinizing the cam screen. _A splash? Why would there be a..._

_Shit._

“What was that,” he demands, holding his hand up to his headset like pushing it further into his ear will make them answer faster. “Rogers, report.”

“Wrench down,” Rogers says, and from inside the wall, Stark yells, “What?!”

“Wrench down,” he repeats, staring down into the vat of coolant that houses the motherboard. 

“Down? Like, you dropped it? Well pick it the fuck up, I need it again like now and I can't exactly get it myself.”

“No,” Rogers answers calmly. “Down like it landed in the vat with the motherboard.”

“Can you reach it?” Stark asks, voice strained. “Kinda need it, here.”

Rogers looks down into the vat. “It's a bit far down.”

“T minus nine,” Phil reminds them, wanting nothing more than to cover his eyes and let someone else take care of this whole mess.”

“Is there another one in the kit?”

Rogers checks that, too, but still comes up at a loss. “Nothing.”

“I can't get this in here without a wrench...”

Rogers looks at the wrench, and then to Stark, and then back to the wrench. He bites his lip and says, “Give me one minute,” before moving to the wall.

He punches a code in, and raises the motherboard out of the vat.

“What are you doing?” Stark asks, and Phil can tell from the way his legs are moving that he's trying to see what is happening without dislodging the things he's holding with his mouth or hands.

Rogers doesn't respond, just moves back to the hole in the floor and slowly lowers himself in. The second he hits the surface, Phil can see him start to shiver, but Rogers just takes a deep breath and submerges himself.

Phil can't see inside the vat very well – just a hint of the bluish sheen of the surface and the slight ripple Steve's body sends over it as he moves about beneath it. He can feel himself holding his breath, wondering how long Rogers can stay under there without breathing.

Rogers' head clears the surface, and Stark asks, “Got it?”

Rogers shivers, shakes his head, and says, “It got lodged in the base of the motherboard. Ran out of air. Give me a few more seconds,” and then dives back under before Stark can get a word in edgewise.

“T minus five,” Phil says, voice wavering, wondering where the hell those last four minutes went. 

“Coulson,” Clint warns in his ear. “We close?”

Phil opens his mouth to respond, but the red ribboning up into the blue of the coolant where he can see it changes the words in his mouth. 

“Oh my God.”

He can't see Rogers, can't see what's happening, and next to him, Sitwell mumbles, “Fuck...”

“What's going on down there?” Clint demands, but Phil is shaking too hard to respond, his breaths uneven and barely supplying enough air to keep his brain processing the image in front of him.

“T minus three,” he says, closing his eyes. Rogers has been under for two minutes.

The surface of the vat is dulling out into a purple color, the muddiest mix of red and blue Phil has ever seen, and he knows that there's no way Rogers' body could be withstanding this kind of cold.

“Coulson,” Stark says. “What is happening.”

Phil can't seem to make his vocal chords work. His attempt at a response comes out as a strangled groan, and he finally covers his eyes, looking away from the screen. 

He's counting the seconds in his head. They've got less than two minutes left. It's done. It's over.

“Coulson, look,” Sitwell says frantically next to him, and he looks up.

Rogers is pulling himself up out of the vat, his whole body shaking, the wrench tucked firmly between his teeth. His skin is dead white, every muscle is clenched, his face is contorted. His right leg drags behind him, smearing the floor with blood where it makes contact.

He puts the wrench in Stark's hand, and Stark jumps slightly at the unexpected touch and manages to squeak out a “Thanks” before pulling his hand back into the wall, and jamming something into place.

“I've got it,” he practically shouts into the comm, pulling himself out of the wall. “Barton, go!”

The countdown reads forty-eight seconds. 

“Barton, you are go for fire,” Phil says firmly, trying to stop his voice from shaking.

He doesn't switch the cam back to the flight deck, but after a second, Barton answers, “Boost engines are a go,” and heaves an audible sigh of relief.

Behind Phil, the technicians start to applaud, and Phil sees tears of relief spring to Sitwell's eyes, but his own are still trained on the cam. 

“Stark,” he says. “Get Rogers to medbay.”

Stark is already struggling to pick him up, but he's shaking almost too much for the smaller man to support.

“Working on it, Coulson,” Stark groans, and then freezes. “I don't think he's breathing.”

“Blake,” Phil says firmly, “We need you in the engine room stat.”

Stark sets Rogers carefully on the ground, his back to Phil, and checks his pulse and listens for breaths.

“Come on, Steve,” he mumbles, “I haven't done CPR since college.”

Laughing desperately, he adds, “And I thought our first kiss would be a little more romantic than this.”

Stark's got his mouth over Rogers', breathing air into him and pumping his chest alternatively. Blake reports in that he's making his way down the spire as fast as he can manage. Phil holds his breath.

“Phil?” Clint says cautiously, quietly over the comms.

Steve sits up with a gasp, and suddenly Phil feels himself start to cry.

—

It's a struggle, getting Steve back to the medbay, but between the two of them Stark and Blake manage to ease him through the zero-g spire and back where there's gravity, where Natasha's waiting with a pile of blankets that she instantly wraps around Steve. 

He tries to warm up while Blake checks his vitals and stitches up the gash in his leg, and when he starts trying to explain what happens, Blake tells him to keep quiet and keep breathing.

Eventually, he's stopped shivering enough to get real words out without being at risk of asphyxiating himself, and he calmly says, “My leg got caught on the base of the motherboard when I tried to turn around with the wrench. Took longer than I'd expected to rip it away.”

He sleeps, still shivering slightly, piled under layers and layers of blankets in the medbay, and Stark waits, uncharacteristically quiet, in the chair next to him all night.

—

In the morning, Steve tries to get up and walk to medbay before Stark wakes up. He ends up on the ground three steps from bed, his stitches ripped, his face contorted in pain, which is where Stark finds him, and where Phil finds the two of them when he comes in, sitting on the ground with Stark trying to distract Steve from the pain.

Blake takes another look at Steve's leg once he's awake, tossing out the ruined bandages and prodding gently at it before redoing thirteen stitches up the front of Steve's shin. 

“You're going to have to stop walking for a while if you want this to heal properly,” Blake tells him, and Steve makes a face that reminds Phil a bit of a petulant child.

“I don't have time to sit around, I've got a rescue mission to command.”

“And you can command it from here. That's why we've got headsets and cameras and technology.”

“We touch down in less than a week. I can't exactly pilot the rescue pod to Mars from a bed in the medbay.”

Blake looks up at Phil through the camera and shakes his head. “Can you do something about this?”

Phil sighs. “Your health is priority. We'll have someone else pilot the rescue pod, and you can command from the flight deck if you're leg's healed enough that you can walk there without collapsing again. Okay?”

If before Steve was a petulant child, now he's a pouting teenage girl. He crosses his arms over his chest and leans back, sighing almost comedically, and Phil wishes the sight wasn't so funny out of context, because he knows how difficult this is for Steve. Not to be able to be the one to help Bucky, not to be the one in action, stuck watching from a camera miles and miles away as the people he loves put their lives on the line.

Blake pats Steve on the back and re-bandages his leg, before leaving Steve with the words, “At least Stark will be here to keep you company, right?”


	8. Chapter 8

“What do you think we got down there?” Clint asks, raising his arms to allow Natasha better access to tighten the straps around his chest. “Aliens?”

“It's their planet. I think they'd technically be 'natives,'” Natasha responds dryly, pulling the strap a little harder than strictly necessary.

“Shut up,” he grumbles, wincing slightly at the strap. “You know what I meant.”

Phil laughs and says, “How's that suit looking, Barton?”

“Little disappointing for my vacation to the sandy surface of Mars. How am I supposed to get a tan in this?”

Natasha whacks him upside the head with a glove before handing it to him to try on. “We can send you down in a bikini, if you're prefer it. I've got a blue one that would really compliment your eyes.”

Clint snorts out a laugh, reaching out to mess up her hair, but she dodges under his arm and the suit prevents him from turning fast enough to catch her.

“Coulson,” Rogers pages him over the headset, “mind coming over to the flight deck for a minute?”

“Sure thing,” Phil says, and switches the camera over just as Rogers limps through the door, half his weight supported by Stark. 

Stark helps Rogers into a seat by the control panel and takes the seat next to him, putting his feet up and leaning back, smiling broadly up at the camera.

“Morning, HAL,” he says, giving the camera a wave, and then rests his head in his hands, absently whistling a tune Phil recognizes as “Daisy Bell.”

“Is Clint getting set up?” Rogers asks.

“Yes. Natasha's getting him suited up; he'll be ready for launch in two hours or so.”

Rogers nods, looking down at the control panel. “Good. I've decided to try sending a message to Bucky on the surface before we head down, to see if he's still capable of receiving it. Stark's going to try to use the transmission we received earlier to see if he can figure out the best channel to send it. I'll let you know if I get ahold of him?”

“Sounds good,” Phil confirms, moving to switch the camera back to Clint in the airlock.

“Really?” he hears Stark whine just before he switches. “That was the perfect opportunity for 'Roger that, Rogers!' And to think I thought you had a sense of humor...”

Phil holds back a laugh. He's reluctant to admit to himself that he's grown a bit fond of the man and his annoying tendencies, and is even more reluctant to do anything that might encourage them. But Stark is nothing if not charming, and it hasn't yet gotten in the way of his work, so Phil figures a private affection is nothing to resist.

Besides, Stark had been the only one able to get through to Rogers since they'd found out about Peggy's death, getting him to talk and move around and even, on occasion, smile. And Stark had barely left Rogers' side since his injury, helping him to the mess hall and the flight deck and the rec room. If nothing else, Phil was grateful for that, and almost regretted having ever thought Stark a selfish man.

Clint is buckling on his helmet when Phil's desktop finally shows the airlock cam again. He subvocalizes a few commands and the suit boots up, the lights on the helmet turning on, the oxygen delivery and filtration systems whirring to life, and a new camera appearing on Phil's screen, showing him the view from Clint's helmet.

“How's it looking, sir?” Clint asks, waving a hand in front of the camera.

“Crystal clear so far,” Phil responds. “How're the oxygen systems working?”

“Computer shows no leaks. Twenty percent power and breathing fine. And I can move, which is an unexpected blessing in itself.”

Clint shoots an obvious glare at Natasha, who crosses her arms and shrugs. The suit – far too cost inefficient for them to be able to afford making more than one – had been fitted to Rogers' body, and though Phil had been confident in Clint's ability to pilot the rescue pod, he had been less confident about his ability to wear the other man's suit. Rogers is a fair bit taller, and Clint's arms have a bulk to them that Phil knows is making the sleeves difficult to maneuver in. But Clint salutes him, waves his arms, and then grabs Natasha and begins to waltz dramatically, so Phil isn't too worried about maneuverability anymore.

“I'd trip you if it didn't mean you'd never get back up,” Natasha threatens as Clint sweeps her into a turn, though Phil knows she could easily duck out of Clint's arms if she tried.

“Hey, Threepio,” Stark calls through the headset, and Phil switches cams back to the flight deck. “We're ready for this if you are, got a link that should get us through to Barnes if anything can.”

“Go ahead and send the transmission, then,” Phil responds, and he only has to wait a few minutes – wishing his focus was back in the airlock, watching Clint prance around checking maneuverability in his suit – before they've established a voice-link with Barnes down on Mars.

“Steve?” he calls out, and Stark holds his own headset up to the radio to make sure Phil can hear okay. “Is that you? You sonuvabitch...” 

“Bucky,” Rogers breathes, his voice thick with relief. “You're alright.”

“Of course I'm alright. You think I was gonna let a tiny little inconvenience like being stuck on Mars kill me? Damn, you must have missed me so much it drove you batshit. I'm guessing you're not on Earth, right?”

“We're in orbit around Mars.”

“So I'll see you tomorrow?”

“I'm sending my pilot down for you. You'll see me when you get your ass back onto my ship in one piece, alright?”

“Sounds good, Commander,” Barnes responds, barking out a harsh laugh. He sounds hoarse or dehydrated or maybe, Phil realizes, like he hasn't used his voice in years. “Hey, you got a biologist up there with you?”

“Yeah,” Steve responds.

“He know anything about gamma radiation?”

Steve pauses, and Stark quickly takes over for him.

“He's basically an expert. That's what his research is on. Why, you got a problem down there involving gamma radiation?”

“You could say that,” Barnes says, a hint of hesitation in his voice. “Just bring him down with your pilot. Trust me, he'll want to see this.”

—

Mars, through the lens of Clint and Bruce's suit-cams, is just as red as Phil always imagined, like the air is thick with rust and colored smoke, the sand flying up in little clouds under their feet. 

Barnes, through the lens of Clint and Bruce's suit-cams, looks even worse-off than Phil imagined from the transmission of him. His eyes are rimmed in permanent dark circles, his skin is eerily pale. He waves Clint and Bruce into the base's airlock with an arm that Phil was sure hadn't been there on the video feed before, and then suddenly realizes isn't so much an arm as a gunmetal grey appendage that moves like an arm, but only vaguely resembles an arm, five oddly shaped fingers moving out of sync with each other when he isn't thinking about them. 

“James Barnes,” he introduces himself once they've made their way into the base, holding out his real hand for them to shake, holding the false one close like he's trying to protect it. “But you can call me Bucky.”

Clint pulls the helmet off, rubbing the back of his neck and looking around. “Clint Barton, and this is Dr. Bruce Banner.”

“Hold up,” Stark says through the headset, and Phil knows that the rest of the crew is together on the flight deck, watching the view through Clint and Bruce's suit-cams as well. “Bruce, can you get me a closer look at that arm?”

Barnes laughs, loud and unexpected, and waves the arm at Bruce's camera, smiling widely.

“It's a little thrown-together, but it's done me pretty well for two years so I can't complain too much.”

“You made this?” Stark asks, and Barnes nods.

“Hard to man down a base on your own with one arm, so I made do with the materials I had. Gonna patch it up when I get home, been working on a new design in my plethora of spare time.”

“You're gonna have to let me take a look at that when you get up on the ship, you know,” Stark answers, and Phil can hear the smile in his voice.

“Sorry to break up the love-fest, Stark,” Clint interrupts, “but I believe that our orders are to get Bucky here back up on the ship as quickly as possible, and not to jizz all over his fancy little arm here. Right, Cap?”

“That's right,” Steve says, voice firm. “Get him up here.”

“Give me a minute, Steve-o,” Bucky says, leading them further into the base. “Gotta get Dr. Bruce here to tell me what of this research is salvageable. Okay?”

Steve stalls for a long moment, and Phil can almost hear the gears in his head working towards a decision.

“Don't make anyone spend any more time on this goddamn planet than you need to,” Bucky continues. “We'll get it done and be right up.”

“It's fine, Rogers,” Phil pages him, saving him the responsibility of the decision. 

“Okay, you heard him, but make it fast, Bucky.”

Bucky leads them into a back room behind a thick, sealed door, and every surface is covered in stacks of paper.

Clint looks around with a low whistle, his suit-cam panning slowly across the room to show the sheer volume of material there.

“Damn, you managed to salvage all of this?”

“There was a lot more I couldn't get. More than half of it was destroyed in the wreck. Our scientists were pretty busy – their research started making some ridiculous amount of progress once we got a certain distance from Earth.”

“The wreck,” Bruce says, nervously. “Do you know what happened? What caused it?”

“Was it aliens?” Clint adds.

Bucky sighs, leaning against the wall and crossing his arms.

“We thought it was, well, yeah, aliens. Intelligent life, something like that. It sure looked like something inhuman had attacked the lab. The wall was ripped out, tables were broken, papers were ripped and thrown all over the place, lab equipment was wrecked... But something was wrong. It took me ages to figure it out – it wasn't until long after Peggy... after Peggy died that I started to piece it together.

“I think it had something to do with the specimen we'd exposed to the gamma radiation. When the storm knocked the power out, the incubator shut off and exposed the samples to the normal air or heat or something that caused a reaction. I don't know if they... exploded, or what, but I think that's got to be it. It's the only thing that makes sense. I figured a gamma expert could provide some more, I don't know, insight into whether or not my theory makes any sense.”

“Do you still have the samples?” Bruce asks, looking around.

“Some of them. I salvaged whatever I could from the lab and put it in another room for you guys to look at whenever you got here. Here, I'll show you.”

He leads Bruce to a door at the back of the room, opening it and turning the light on. Inside is a large metal box.

“I put the samples in the box, so that they wouldn't do any more damage if they exploded or anything.”

He opens the top of the box and steps back, letting Bruce look inside. 

“This is all I managed to salvage before my suit started running out of oxygen and I had to come back into base,” Bucky continues, stepping back out of the room, eyeing the box like it's a bomb about to detonate. “I'm still not sure I trust those, so you'd better do what you're gonna do quickly, Dr. Banner.”

“Hold on,” Blake says over the comm link, a strange tension in his voice. “Barnes, describe the lab when you found it after the wreck again?”

“Uh, tables broken, walls dented and ripped out, papers torn and thrown everywhere, lab equipment shattered all over the floor...”

“Shit,” Blake says. 

“What?” Steve says. “What is it?”

“I don't think it was an explosion.”

“Then what the hell was it? Because I've been up here for going on five years, there's no way you're getting me to believe this was actually aliens.”

Blake takes a deep breath. “We had an incident on the ship a few months ago, our samples got left out of the incubator. Bruce was pretty upset, was convinced the experiment had been ruined, got pretty angry and ripped up some of the lab. I did a CT scan to make sure he wasn't concussed afterwards or anything, and got some weird readings in the hypothalamus area.”

“The hypothalamus?”

“The hypothalamus controls emotions like anger. Rage. Can trigger violent responses. What I'm saying is, what if when the gamma irradiated samples hit room-temperature, they give off something that triggers that rage-response? And when you lost power up there, the incubators you had your samples in lost power, and the scientists in your lab were exposed to that same effect, and they were the ones who tore up the lab?”

“That's a pretty extreme response.”

“Well, theoretically they'd been exposed to a fairly high concentration of gamma radiation by that point. Maybe the more there is, the worse the reaction is.”

“Wait,” Natasha says, calmly. “And Bruce, who has been exposed to more gamma radiation than any of us, is down there right now examining the room-temperature samples that drove your scientists to wreck the base?”

“Fuck,” Clint says suddenly, and Phil hears a crash, and Bruce's suit-cam goes blank.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One more chapter and then the epilogue to go!
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading and bearing with me through this. I hope you continue to enjoy it.


	9. Chapter 9

A second later, Clint's cam follows Bruce's into darkness, and all Phil has is the sound of Clint's steady breathing over the comm link. 

“Barton, status report,” he commands, trying desperately to steady his own breathing, matching his inhales and exhales with Clint's, ignoring the sharp pain of the table's edge digging into his palms.

“Bruce,” he hears Clint say, soft and easy, careful and comforting. “Bruce, just take a deep breath, okay?”

The response sounds more like a growl than an affirmation, but Phil figures Bruce must at least be trying to listen, because Clint just answers, “Good, good. That's right.”

“Coulson,” Rogers says, his voice thick and strained with anxiety. “Coulson, we've lost contact. Do you have visual?”

“Negative, Commander. But I've got audio.”

“What's going on down there?”

Phil takes a deep breath, trying to figure out for himself what he actually thinks is happening. 

“I think they're okay. I'll get them back up to you as soon as possible.”

Clint's voice breaks through again. “Bruce, we're going to get in the pod and go back up to Ares, okay? Do you think you can stay calm?”

Another low growl, and then Phil hears Bruce choke out, “Yes.”

“Okay. Coulson? Banner, Barnes, and I are headed back to the pod. I'll page you when we get in, and if we haven't in ten minutes, page me. Affirmative?”

Phil nods, and then realizes that Clint can't see him nod.

“Affirmative, Barton. Be safe.”

The comm link goes dead, and Phil sits. He taps his leg, taps his fingers against the table, breaks the cap of a pen, channelling his nervous energy into anything on the desk he can find with which to fidget. He stands, he paces, he walks out into the hallway and pours himself a cup of coffee he isn't likely to drink. Without Clint's voice in his ear keeping him updated, it's all he can do to force himself not to imagine the worst. 

When he gets back to his desk, the styrofoam coffee cup nearly cracking in his grip, Sitwell leans over from his own desk and rests a hand on Phil's shoulder.

“They'll be fine,” he says, his voice warm, and if anything could make Phil feel a little better it's this, but even this won't assuage the nervous ache in his chest of the buzz at the back of his mind. 

“Thanks,” he says through gritted teeth. 

“We're in,” Clint says several long minutes later, but Phil isn't resting any easier. 

“And Banner?”

“He's... stable,” Clint says and then swallows. “Barnes is keeping him calm right now. Am I clear for takeoff with this thing?”

“You're clear,” he confirms. 

—

The trip from the surface of Mars to the close, non-synchronous orbit in which Ares is stationed is not a short one. Phil sends a couple of the technicians home, figuring there's no use keeping everyone there overnight. At this point, if something goes wrong there isn't much anyone can do from the ground. All the computers in the world can't account for human error.

An hour in, Sitwell pulls something out of his desk drawer and hands it to Phil seconds before Phil bites through his own lip.

It's a photograph, taken at a retirement party they'd had a few years ago, before Fury took over, and Phil has never seen it before but remembers the moment immediately. He and Clint had just started sleeping together a few weeks before – he can tell from the way the stand far enough apart for discretion, but close enough to feel the hum of electricity in the space between their skin – and they're laughing, Clint's smile wider than Phil has seen it in a long time.

He looks over at Sitwell, one eyebrow raised, but Sitwell shakes his head and sighs, “You aren't as secretive as you think you are, Phil.”

Sitwell's a good friend, the closest Phil thinks he has, but for a long time Phil has been the kind of man who has coworkers instead of friends, and Phil had never considered telling anyone about Clint, too unsure to define anything, too worried to risk.

It was never an unwillingness to commit that kept Phil quiet, that kept words like “boyfriend” or “love” out of the conversation, that kept there from being a conversation at all. Lack of commitment was the farthest thing. But the way he and Clint existed, the place they inhabited together was something so delicate and gentle and beautiful that he couldn't help but be afraid that a word would be enough to shatter it.

And with their jobs on the line, they'd had a mutual unspoken understanding that they, whatever they were together as a “they” and as a uint, didn't leave the room.

“You know?” he asks quietly, and Sitwell nods.

“Don't worry, though. I think I'm the only one.”

Phil lets out a sigh of relief, and stares back down at the photo.

“I mean it, Phil. He'll be okay.”

—

“T minus ten to Ares II,” Clint reports, and Phil jerks awake from where he must have fallen asleep at his desk. Sitwell gives him a thumbs up to confirm that all is still well.

“How's Banner?” he asks, shaking the drowsiness from his head and turning on the cam for Ares' flight deck.

“Looking a little green,” Barnes says, presumably through Banner's headset. “I had to sedate him, but he's just starting to come around.”

“Roger that,” Phil says, “be careful you two,” and then flips the comm link over to the flight deck. “Rescue pod incoming in T minus ten.”

“Got it,” Stark responds, waving at the camera. “I'll go wake Rogers up. I forced him to take a nap so he'd stop pacing nervous circles around me. I was afraid he'd wear straight through the floor by the time they got here.”

Stark walks out the door, leaving the flight deck empty, and Phil stands up, crossing his arms if only for somewhere to put them so they stop feeling like awkward weights hanging at his sides. He wishes he could flip the camera to see Clint, but with Clint and Bruce's suit cams both offline and no cam set up in the rescue pod, there's nothing he can do but hold his breath.

He turns his back to the desk, tired of looking at the empty flight deck, and leans against it, making eye contact with Hill across the room. She gives him an even smile and a small nod and then turns back to the screen of the technician next to whom she's standing.

Except then Phil sees a strange expression cross her face. Her eyebrows furrow and her lips purse, and then she glances nervously back up at Phil.

He raises an eyebrow at her, and she shakes her head.

“Weird readings on the rescue pod,” she tells him after whispering a few more words to the technician and crossing the room. “We think it's probably just a glitch because none of the other systems are picking it up, but it looks like the oxygen levels are going down.”

Phil turns and types a few commands into his own computer, pulling up the schematics, reading over the levels. All normal.

No – all normal except for one. He touches it, pulling up the details with a quick slide of his fingers.

Oxygen levels are declining. 

In fact, oxygen levels are–

And there it is, the flash of red and the steady high-pitched beep. Oxygen levels are critical. There is a breach in the hull of the rescue pod.

Hill is furious. She starts yelling something at the techs, but Phil has to block it out, covering his ears and focusing on the task at hand.

“Barton,” he pages frantically. “Come in.”

There is a long pause before Clint responds, and when he does he's breathless and frantic. “Kind of in the middle of something, boss.”

“There's a breach in your hull. Oxygen levels are critical.”

“Gathered that much, thanks,” Clint says back, but his voice is less snarky and more panicked and there's a loud thud somewhere in the background. 

Meanwhile, Steve has made it back to the flight deck, and Phil can see him and Stark sitting at the control panel on his camera at the corner of his desktop. 

“What's going on up there?”

“Well,” Clint responds, an air of forced casualty to his voice. “Bruce here wasn't very happy when he woke u–”

He's cut off by a forced exhale of breath, like he's just been thrown into a wall, and when he speaks again he's winded.

“Any bright ideas, Coulson?”

“How close is the pod to Ares II? Close enough I could have Stark send out a line and you could make your way by hand?”

There is a long pause as, Phil assumes, Clint gauges the distance.

“I think so, yeah.”

“Then get your helmets on and get prepped, I'll have a line out to you as soon as I can.” 

—

Stark is furious that Phil didn't call him in sooner, but Steve rests a large hand on his back and gives him a look, and he grumbles something and runs off to the airlock to get to work.

Steve slumps into the chair he was sitting in before, burying his face in his hands.

“They're going to be okay, Commander,” Phil tells him before switching cameras to follow Stark.

“Yeah?” Steve responds weakly. “You sure of that?”

“I am,” Phil lies, and then a bit of the honesty starts to creep though. “They have to be.”

By the time Phil switches cams to the airlock, Stark's in his suit, tied in, and already working on sending the line out to the rescue pod. The cam in the airlock gives Phil a perfect view out the open door.

He has to close his eyes for a while, letting himself just listen to Stark's running commentary of the process. He tries not to picture what is happening, and tries harder not to picture what will happen if anyone slips up. He can't let himself do that. He won't let himself do that. They'll be fine.

They send Bruce first, and Stark's voice in his ear seems to have some vaguely calming effect as he guides him, hand over hand, up the line and into the airlock, hooking him in quickly with surprising speed and success. Clint is next, at Barnes' insistence, and he makes it into the airlock without a hitch, clipping himself in to wait for Barnes.

Barnes makes it halfway up the line before his left arm slips for the first time, the robotic fingers flailing to try to grab the line again. He dangles there by one arm for a long moment before regaining his grip and starting back towards the ship.

When he slips again, Phil doesn’t have time to register what Clint is doing as he unhooks himself and grabs ahold of the line again to make his way down to Barnes, let alone stop him.

“Barton,” he warns, and he'd order Stark to pull Clint back into the ship, but Stark is still wrestling Bruce to keep him still and keep him in the airlock, and Phil knows that making Stark move would be the surest way to maximize casualties.

Clint doesn't answer him, just keeps moving, hand over hand, down the line connecting the ships until he reaches Barnes and wraps an arm around his waist, lifting him up to grab hold of the line again.

One arm around Barnes' waist and the other matching the pace of Barnes' right arm on the line, Clint slowly begins to guide them back towards Ares. Painfully slow, Phil thinks, his hands gripping the edges of his desk anxiously. 

They're only a foot or so out the door when Stark reaches a hand out towards them to pull them in, and Barnes' only free arm is the robotic one, so Stark grabs his wrist instead, minimizing room for error, and pulls.

Bruce shakes him off, and as Stark loses his grip on Barnes' arm, Phil loses sight of Barnes and Clint completely except for the one hand Clint manages to grip the bottom of the airlock door with. 

On Phil's screen, something else begins to flash red.

Barnes reappears in the door a second later, grabbing Stark's hand again and clipping himself into the airlock with his good hand, and Clint must have lifted him to where he could make it inside, but Clint still isn't pulling himself up.

“Barton,” he says, praying for an answer.

His screen starts to flash a little brighter, and he looks down. The oxygen levels in Clint's suit are draining fast. He must have cracked his helmet when he hit the side of the ship.

“Barton,” he repeats, his voice frantic.

Clint’s soft voice drifts over the comm link, a soft “yeah?” and Phil breathes a sigh of relief.

“Barton, status report,” he demands.

There is a pained exhale on the other end of the link, and Clint answers, “This is Major Tom to ground control.”

“This is no time for joking, Barton,” Phil tells him through gritted teeth. His arms are shaking over the camera controls as he frantically tries to maneuver one of the interior cams to show him the hull of the ship where he knows Clint is hanging on.

“Who’s joking, Coulson?” Clint lets out a forced laugh. “Tell my wife I love her very much,” he says under his breath, and with Clint’s soft voice in his ear Phil can almost pretend it’s just them and the buzz of fluorescents and the hard mattress of Clint’s on-base quarters.

Phil knows what he means. He's painfully aware – as aware of the fact that he's about to lose Clint as he is unaware of the fact that his hands are bleeding from how hard he's gripping the sharp edges of his desk. But just because he's aware doesn't mean he's giving up.

“She knows,” he whispers back, and he hopes Clint knows too, with all his heart. 

There is a buzz and the comm link goes dead.

“Can you hear me, Major Tom?”

Phil’s voice is met with silence. A raw, drawn out silence that makes his stomach drop and his blood scream and his head ache like something is pressing out from inside his skull. He'd swear that nothing could get any worse, but suddenly the silence gives way to static, and he presses his eyes shut and holds his breath because he knows what static means.

He designed the biometric headset comms himself. Static can only mean one of two things. Either Clint took the headset out, which he couldn't have done without removing his helmet completely, or Clint's vitals are no longer registering in the headset's internal sensors as functional.

He steps away from the desk, turning his back on the camera and motioning for Sitwell to take over. This is his job, he knows that. But for once, his job seems a little less important than it usually does.

He takes his headset out, vaguely aware of Sitwell behind him putting his own in and saying something to Stark over it, but his vision is blurring at the edges and he's not sure if it's from the vertigo he's suddenly feeling or the tears he's just barely aware are filling his eyes. 

Even without the headset in, all he hears is static. 

And then a scream cuts through the static, and Phil is sure that's it. Clint's gone. Clint's dead. He turns around – better to face it now than delay the inevitable. 

But Sitwell is smiling. Sitwell is running over to him and shaking his shoulders and saying something Phil can't hear and _smiling._

He blinks a few times and shakes his head to clear his ears, trying to listen to what Sitwell is saying.

And when he does, he thinks his heart stops.

“He made it,” Sitwell is saying. “He's alive.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Just the epilogue left now!


	10. Epilogue

“For the isentropic flow of a perfect gas, what equation would you use to determine the change in enthalpy?”

Phil can hear the smile in Clint's voice even if he can't see him across the kitchen table – a repurposed old desk stacked too high with precarious towers of books and notes. 

He answers with a grin, still looking down at the book open on the table in front of him as he writes the equation down on a piece of paper, balls it up, and tosses it at Clint over the stacks. 

“You sure about that?” Clint asks.

“Positive.”

“Then I think you'll pass.” Clint picks up the stack of books immediately between them and moves it to the floor, smiling at Phil from across the table. “I still don't know why you're studying so hard. Everyone on base knows you know this. The written portion of the exam is just a formality.”

“That doesn't mean I'm going to risk failing,” he replies, reaching across the table to take Clint's hand in his.

The added weight of the thick silver ring around Clint's finger when he tangles their hands together is still foreign to Phil, still something he's working on adjusting to, like the king sized bed, the large bath tub, the cluttered fifth-floor walk up they now share. 

It's a makeshift home, messy floors and bookshelves made of salvaged milk crates and the same peeling floral wallpaper that had been there when they bought the place. But then, theirs is a makeshift life, pieced together from things that never should have been if not for a lot of luck and a little bit of elbow grease.

“You know Carol would pass you anyway, right?” Clint asks, running his thumb over the back of Phil's hand in soft circles.

“I don't need Carol passing me as a favor to you.”

“She wouldn't be doing it on a favor to me. She's be doing it because she knows you're a competent and deserving scientist, and because you saved her from a long, dull life as a reluctant lab technician.”

Phil scoffs at that. “I'm not the one who recommended her for flight instructor.”

“No, but you're the one who convinced her not to quit when she couldn't go on Ares.”

It's a point to which Phil has to concede, which he does by rolling his eyes and laughing a little, using his free hand to close the book in front of him.

“And why are you so eager for me to stop studying?”

Clint grins, knowing he's won, and says, “Steve and Tony invited us over for dinner, to wish you luck. They want you on the mission with us just as much as I do.”

Phil raises an eyebrow. “And the three of you are so sure you're going to be selected for the mission?”

Clint pouts a bit, barely able to keep the smile off his lips as he does so. “Come on, Phil, who could say 'no' to a beautiful face like this?”

Phil tugs at Clint's hand, bringing it to his lips, and brushes a kiss over his knuckles. 

“You do have a point, I suppose.”

“Besides,” Clint says, leaning forward pressing a quick kiss to Phil's lips. “After all we've been through I think we deserve a vacation together, and I hear Titan's lovely in July.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And there it is, folks. I hope you all enjoyed reading this as much as I loved writing it :)


End file.
